The Women of the Sixth Floor (2011)

The French really have this genre down. They've been making funny and agreeable movie farces for forever, and I for one never tire of it. The access to these films is the reason I faithfully stream Netflix. The film isn’t groundbreaking, profound or unpredictable, and evolves in a conventional way; but it’s light-hearted, pleasant and amusing. It made me smile. This is one of the keys to French comedy success: The film is set in 1962, and it ties some profound themes into the plot – the class division in French society (bourgeois vs. the working class) and the impact of the Spanish Civil War on working-class families – it never delves into them (nor does it really desire to), with the issues providing a context more than affecting the chain of events. On top of that is the social change that is starting to erupt in France. When the film begins, husband and wife Jean-Louis (Fabrice Luchini) and Suzanne (Sandrine Kiberlain) are more of less complacent in their routine lives. He is a conservative stockbroker who runs a firm founded by his grandfather, and she is a high-strung socialite who is exhausted by days spent going to dressmakers and having lunch. She has lived under the thumb of Jean-Louis' mother, and now she is dead. Time to move on. Or at least redocorate. But Germaine, the French maid, remains fiercely loyal to her original employer, to the point where she is incensed enough to quit. Enter a Spanish maid. Suzanne's friends rave about them. They work all hours, they don't need Sundays off, and they are better workers. The top floor of Suzanne's house is rented out to a clutch of them, and she hired the latest arrival to work for her. Little by little, circumstances make Jean-Louis take notice of all these Spanish women on the sixth floor. "They live above us and we know nothing about them," he marvels to Suzanne, who marvels in turn that a man who never cared about anything is now evincing concern for other human beings. That, of course, is the whole point of what happens on the sixth floor. Almost against his will, this dull man becomes fascinated by the expressive exuberance of these women and finds that nothing can remain the same after he lets them into his life. Not only are Jean-Louis and Suzanne thrilled with Maria, they get sucked in to the culture of the maids. They start to see that they may not have their values quite right, and that realization brings about big changes for both of them. The film is largely light and airy, but it does have these underlying themes that you can wrestle with should you choose to do so. The film doesn't require that of you, which is the genius of the French.