The Housekeeper

In Claude Berri's The Housekeeper, Jean-Pierre Bacri creates a memorable portrait of middle-aged desperation as Jacques, a Parisian sound technician recently separated from his wife. The actor's perpetually down-turned mouth and dour expression capture the character's loneliness and melancholy perfectly, and his prickly reactions to the constant irritations of life are both amusing and sad. After the unhappy bachelor hires free-spirited, young Laura (Emilie Dequenne) to tidy up his apartment, she moves in and the pair become romantically involved, until a vacation to Brittany reveals their very different attitudes toward life. Unfortunately, this story--based on a novel by Christian Oster--is rather flimsy and neither credible nor terribly engaging when played at the very deliberate pace needed to stretch it to feature length. Too, while Bacri's hangdog expression and frazzled intensity are exactly right, little else in the film has the ring of dramatic truth, particularly the character of the flighty, rather airhead-ish Laura. By the midway point the picture has ceased to be a perceptive character study and instead becomes a protracted lead-in to a biting punch-line. Optional. (F. Swietek)