Movie Review: Avenue Montaigne

Avenue Montaigne is one of those well-executed French romantic comedies that makes up for being utterly negligible by being genuinely funny and asking some decent questions about life and love even if it never manages to answer them effectively.

After hearing her grandmother repeatedly tell the simplified version of her life ("I wanted to live in luxury, but could not afford it, so I went to work in luxury instead") a young woman goes to Paris and manages to get a job at a café that has historically hired only men. Situated between a theatre, a concert hall and an auction house, the café serves diverse clientele, all of whom the young woman comes into contact with and eventually develops various types of relationships with.

Through her eyes we witness a world-class pianist who hates his job struggle with his wife who seems more attached to his fame than his music; an utterly neurotic actress complain, bully and panic her way through an utterly untenable work schedule; a wealthy father selling off his art collection while his son complains that the older man's new girlfriend (who is also the son's ex-lover) is a gold-digger; and a middle-aged woman with a love of lip-synching who is retiring from a long career as a house manager with more tacky souvenirs than you really want to contemplate any one individual possessing. Through all of this, and in the way of all French film it seems, our heroine remains perky and naïve, the perfect creature to be the hapless confessor to the down, out, and frustrated successful.

Romantic comedy is not my genre of choice, but I will say that the French really do create a vastly superior product in this regard. As my movie going companion noted, absolutely nothing in Avenue Montaigne happened because of "just missed." There weren't horrible misunderstandings because anyone got anywhere a second too late. As such, while you might be perfectly clear on what will happen by the end of Avenue Montaigne, minute to minute was at least a moderate surprise. Also a big plus, is that happily ever after in Avenue Montaigne didn't just focus on romantic love, but on other forms of happiness and contentment as well.

However, for a film told in an entirely naturalistic style (if you're willing to forgive the occasional voiceover), Avenue Montaigne required a ridiculous amount of suspension of disbelief from the hiring practices of cafes, to the security policies of theatres to the practices of auction houses. Had Avenue Montaigne been more heightened and farcical, the grave stretches of reality the plot required would have been much easier to deal with.

Finally, a note on the subtitles: astoundingly inaccurate. Sure, they tell the same story as the actual French, but they unnecessarily change the language nearly constantly and with no consistency I could really understand. It's not important, unless you speak enough French to wonder why it's happening. All of this is perhaps best summed up by the fact that the French title of Avenue Montaigne is Fauteuils d'Orchestre, that is, literally, "Armchairs of the Orchestra" -- a title which, with a little bit of work, could have actually reflected the film and the French with some accuracy as opposed to the essentially random one we wound up with in English.

If you like this genre of film or need something innocuous for a date movie, this is a fairly good choice. But it's not my thing, and I can't imagine someone paying today's ticket prices to see it in theatres.