A Private Life (2026)

I watched this on a plane en rout home from a very restful vacation. I had just had a joint replacement in my dominant arm, which was boring and painful and a little scary because there was so much I could not do that is important to me. I could not cook, write, or sew, and it was hard to type. While I love to read and watch movies, when that is all you can do it quickly wears thin. So the trip was as much about getting out of my house as it was about exploring a new place, and it was very successful indeed. This is is a 2025 French mystery thriller Jodie Foster in her first French-language acting role. She plays renowned and vaguely arrogant psychiatrist Lilian Steiner, who has an old school psychoanalytic approach to the profession, complete with the couch. When she is informed that her patient Paula has taken her own life, she refuses to accept the official ruling. Convinced that foul play is involved, Lilian launches her own quirky, private investigation into the circumstances of Paula's death. Along the way, she enlists the reluctant help of her affectionate ex-husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), and navigates the absurdities of her own unraveling personal and professional life. It is odd, slightly bizarre and completely out of step with modern psychiatry but in the end, I enjoyed it.

An Impossible Love (2018)

I watched this on Kanopy, which is a streaming service that your library might subscribe to, and has some really great films you might not find another way. This is French story of lust, which leads to a mother-daughter story. It has the erotic intensity of a love story and the pathos of a coming-of-age saga, but with a much darker, messier, and more unresolved segue than is strictly traditional in either genre. Christine and Phillipe meet and become involved. It is mid-twentieth century France, and he is very classist, clear that he would find her more marriage material if she had money, is she sure her father doesn't have any? Jews always hide their wealth. At which point she should have kicked him to the curb, but she doesn't, she can't, and over a very long time, she comes to really regret that. The movie has a lot of psychological depth, and the story is deftly told. This is far more than a sincle mother raising her duaghter alone to adulthood, it has a lot to think about wrapped in a 120 minutes.

Saint Laurent (2014)

This is a biopic about a mostly young Yves Saint Laurent, although there are somewhat distracting flashes forward and backwards towards the end of the movie.  It wasn’t easy being Saint Laurent. But, often enough, it could be self absorbed, self indulgent, and dizzyingly creative.  The coiture aspects of the movie are gorgeously done, demonstrating the genius of the fashion designer, and that his talent was evident at a very young age.  He was wildly successful professionally across his life span, and he was lucky enough to have an adept manager who kept his brand protected and the money flowing.
Much of the movie reflects upon the designer's lifestyle, which is a portrait in excess.  It is to wallow in Fellini-esque excess in the mid and late 1970's that involves bottomless glasses of pricey champagne, bins full of sedatives and hallucinogens, cliche high-society types, easy pre-AIDS sex of every stripe, pulsing electronica music and gorgeous vapid people lounging.  That is just not my thing, but it does seem to be an accurate reflection of Saint Laurent's life and his survival into older age is a tribute to his resilience.

Les Miserables (2019)

There is a lot to unpack in this Oscar nominated movie. 
It takes a riff from Victor Hugo’s majestically sprawling account of poverty and revolt in 19th century France and it is not given so much an update, or even an official adaptation, as it is a major kick in the head.  It is set in the director’s native banlieue of Montfermeil, which is also the setting for parts of the famous novel, the film is something like Hugo’s classic story mixed with The Wire— a gritty and fiery urban thriller underscored by scathing social commentary on the current state of the Paris suburbs, depicted here as a powder keg ready to pop..
It is cops versus the poor.  The team of police officers consists of veteran squad leader Chris, aka “the Pink Pig,” a crooked trash-talking cop who operates outside the law to get the job done; Gwada, a more guarded local who follows Chris’ orders without much argument; and newbie Stephane aka “Greaser,” who’s been transferred over from Cherbourg, in Normandy, in order to be closer to his son.  Stoic and highly observant, Stephane reflects the observer's view. Lawlessness, or at least a kind of organized criminal hierarchy, rules the land, with various groups competing for territory and forever on the verge of violence is what he sees, and his coworkers throw some gasoline on an already smoldering situation, and it blows up in their face.

A Monster in Paris (2011)

This is a charming animated movie by Bibo Bergeron, known for his adaption of the wonderful book 'The Invention of Hugo Cabret' into the equally charming movie 'Hugo'.  It has shades of 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame', mixed with song and dance, love, an inventor and a charming monkey.

The movie is set during the flood of 1910 in Paris.  Emile is a camera operator in a movie theater and his friend Raoul is a delivery man who has a penchant for invention.  He has designed his delivery truck with a number of features that are even today not available in a motorized vehicle.  He is fun and impulsive and in love with a singer, Lucille.  Emile and Raoul make a delivery to a professor's house and since he is away, Raoul takes the opportunity to show Emile the professor's arboretum and chemistry lab.  Things quickly go wrong and they create a 7 foot flea, who terrorizes Paris in no time.  It is like the Ebola virus of their time.  The flood is a far greater threat, but better to focus on the sensational rather than the realistic threats to safety.  Lucille is the one who discovers that the flea has the heart of a troubadour and the dance skills to match.  She dresses him in a disguise and convinces her friends that he is worth defending.  The story is nothing special, but it is a lot of fun, definitely family friendly and whimsical in the way that makes me love French animated films.

Last Love (2013)

This is yet another movie about the end of one's life--I seem to be watching a lot of movies of late that involve actors who are at or near my parent's age.  It may be coincidence or it might be because I am thinking about my parents.  They are trying to move to be nearer to us at a time when they can do the move themselves, rather than having to be moved.

Matthew Morgan is a retired philosophy professor who's wife died, and he is left bereft.  I am sure that I do not want to feel like he does, although it is entirely possible that if I outlive my spouse and I still have my wits about me that I will be incapacitated.  His life takes a turn for the better when he meets Pauline on the bus.  She is a cha cha dance instructor who befriends him in the most genuine of ways.  I think that one of the keys to successful aging is to have friends who are younger than you, ideally along the way, so that even if you live to be quite old, and everyone who is your age is long gone, that you still have people in your life who are still alive and kicking.

Pauline does more than give Matthew something bright in his life--she is a bridge between him and his children.  Losing a spouse does not help with the task of  helping your children lose their parent--and Matthew was not a model father, so he was no better at that task than he was at moving on himself.  Pauline facilitates detente, and it is a bittersweet film with some flashes of wisdom.  And it is streaming on Netcflix. 

My Afternoons with Margueritte (2010)

Germain (Gerard Depardieu) is a man with very low self esteem.  As the movie unfolds we have no trouble seeing why that might be.  His mother verbally abuses him as a child, and now that Germain is a middle aged man, he lives in a trailer in his mother's backyard and their relationship has not changed a bit.  He was equally bullied by his teachers and fellow students as a child.  He cannot keep a job, he is not married, and he thinks of himself as dumb and illiterate.  The noteworthy thing is that he remained kind despite the lack of kindness afforded him.

Germain spends afternoons in the park with a group of pigeons.  He does odd jobs, but he makes time to eat his lunch outside and talk to his feathered friends.  There he meets Margueritte (Gisele Casadesus, 97 years old when the movie was filmed).  She is a bird like woman, frail and brilliant, kind and wise.  She is charmed by Germain's relationship with the pigeons that she herself has come to enjoy, and they become fast friends.  She reads to him, and he listens--it turns out that he is an auditory learner.  He loves Camus, he loves picturing the stories she tells him, and before long he loves her.  She helps him to see himself as worthy of love, and that has all sorts of beneficial down stream effects on Germain--and in the end he is able to do something meaningful for him as well.  The film is equal parts charming and sentimental.

Intouchables (2012)

This is a feel good movie from start to finish.  It has elements of Pygmalion.  It has some rags to riches components.  It is wise and funny and while much of the plot is predictable, the performances of the two main actors is so sweet that we forgive that.  And it has a basis in a true story, and we always like to see happy endings that have some basis in reality.

Philippe (Francois Cuzet) is a millionaire who was is a quadriplegic secondary to a para-gliding accident. Driss (Omar Sy) is a man out on parole for robbery, who applies for the job of Philippe's caregiver only so he can be rejected and get a signature on his application for unemployment benefits. As Philippe interviews one boring job applicant after another, many with ample caregiving experience but very little in the way of life experience, it becomes clear that Phillppe needs not only physical help but friendship and companionship. When you cannot perform any of your activities of daily living, the person who is doing them for you is someone you not only rely on for your very existence but also the person you spend the day with.  Driss' elan and irreverence is refreshing, and Philippe astonishes him and his own household staff by offering Driss the job.

So these are two men separated by almost everything: education, culture, money, you name it.  Phillippe has retained a sense of humor and Driss has retained his sense that he knows what the good life is--and that while money matters, there is a whole lot available out there that is free.  Good music, dancing, walking outdoors, sex, a little bit of marijuana--okay all of that is not free, but it doesn't cost the earth and you don't need to live in opulence to have access to it--Phillippe is afraid to take chance and Driss can't resist them.  Phillipe offers Driss a chance at a better life, and Driss offers Phillippe a way to re-engage with the world.  Which works for both of them.  It is not a deep movie, but it is a lot of fun to watch.

Amour (2012)

First and foremost, do not think about this as a light romantic comedy.  It is super serious, sobering, and disturbing.  The director is in no mood to spare you any of the pain and suffering that this elderly couple go through as she slowly slips from life with a series of strokes.  You are meant to squirm and be uncomfortable and to think about your grandparents, your parents, your friends, your neighbors and ultimately yourself facing the unbearable choices that lay before all of at the end of life.  If you want to postpone that inward reflection, do not see this movie. 

This movie won the Best Foreign Language Film this year, and it was nominated for Best Film. So why the dire warnings up front?  you really need to be in the mood to really enjoy what this movie has to offer--which is rich and deep and absolutely worth devoting your time and energy to.  The couple are close, they have had a cultured and full life together, but when she learns that she is going to gradually slip away and there is nothing that can be done about it, she makes her husband promise he will let her die at home.   Well, that turns out to be a very tall order indeed, and it is well worth thinking about the price that one's family pays when that is the promise you extract from them.  Think twice before those words pass your lips.
You will not walk away from the movie and leave it in the theatre--you will take it home with you.

Le Havre (2011)

This is a French movie by a Finnish director, and it has a charming  Buster Keaton deadpan humor kind of feel about it.  The wonderful things that I adore in French films are present, but there is also a plot.  Just lovely.

The story follows a ne'er-do-well shoe shine man, Marcel (André Wilms).  He is cobbling out a minimal existence with his wife, Arletty in a community that lets him buy bread on credit and the shop owners cloe up when he walks by for fear that he will take more wares on credit that he cannot pay for.  His life is in slow motion—nothing much happens, nothing much changes.  That is until he gets involved with an on-the-run young African migrant, Idrissa.  Idrissa is found in a container from a ship that has been unexpectedly delayed en route to London, and a police officer Marcel knows well is tasked with finding the boy.  The cop turns out to have a heart, and redeems himself in Marcel’s eyes by the end of the movie.  The film is set in the port city of the same name, and Marcel sets about both hiding the boy, and finding out who he is and how he might help him.  "Le Havre" above all adheres to Kaurismäki's aesthetic of expressionlessness.  His actors must convey what they're feeling without changing the look on their faces.  They do this with remarkable results, and the film is a joy to watch.

A droll ode to the downtrodden and dispossessed, "Le Havre" joins Ari Kaurismäki's unmistakable stylistic flourishes with two things additional features: an overt social conscience and a sweet-natured fairy tale sensibility.

Incendies (2012)

Huge spoiler alert!  There is no way to respond to this movie without giving away a central element of the plot—which we learn about 7/8 of the way through the movie, but it goes a long way toward explaining why the movie has a powerful impact.

This is a variation on the Oedipus story—but it is told from Jocasta’s point of view, or, in this case, it is Nawal’s story.  The story opens and comes close to closing at a community swimming center in takes place in a fictional Middle Eastern country which bears a remarkable resemblance to Lebanon, both topographically and politically.  Lebanon was created from the ashes of the Ottoman empire post-WWI as an enclave for the Maronite Christians.  At the time, Christians made up 84% of the territory that became Lebanon, and it was one of the less controversial requests that France and Britain grappled with after the First World War.  But then came WWII and in it’s aftermath, the establishment of Israel out of Palestine.  That brought a large influx of immigrants into Lebanon from the south, and that is where Nawal’s Christian family lived.  She fell in love with a Muslim, which did not sit well with her brothers—he was killed, and so would she have been if not for the intervention of her grandmother.  She is pregnant, and gives birth to a baby she gives up, but not before the grandmother tattoos the babies heel.  Nawal wants to find him in the future.

The war ruins everything.  When her college is closed, Nawal travels southwards in search of her son, and what she finds changes everything—the Muslims have bombed the Christian towns and the Christians are killing Muslim civilians.  It is bedlam and the orphanage has been reduced to rubble.  Nawal becomes militarized by this, and that decision seals her fate once and for all.  She ceases to be a mother and instead becomes a martyr, and she murders and goes to prison for 15 years because of it.  A part of her soul is broken off and while it is not enough to kill her, it is a crippling blow.  Her son was swept up by  war lords who teach him to be a killer, so a piece of his soul is ripped away from him as well, and together they unknowingly create a future problem.  They meet up in prison—she the prisoner, he the torturer, but just like the myth, they do not recognize each other.

Nawal has twins while in prison, and after her release she emigrates to Canada with them—when she discovers the truth, it is too much for her.  She dies, but in death she sends the twins off to discover her past—and theirs.  I am not sure that the truth will help them, and it could very well hurt them—in the myth, Etiocles kills Polynices over ruling Thebes—but they may be able to start working through the trauma that life them off with through no fault of their own. 

The Hairdresser's Husband (1990)

This is a movie of the genre of French films that is really not about anything in particular. At the end, you are left wondering why stop here? But I love French films like that and so that is no problem—if it drives you crazy, this might not be for you. The thing that this movie does amazingly well is to demonstrate the creation of a sexual fetish. Patrice Leconte is the very talented film maker who tells this somewhat odd story in such gorgeous detail that we are swept along, even though it is hard to at times. The center of attention is Antoine (Jean Rochefort). From early adolescence he has desired only one thing in life, to be a hairdresser's husband. Why? That is the best part—he loved the physical closeness that the hairdresser has when she cuts your hair. She and the dental hygienist are the only two people who rub their breasts up against you for professional reasons that do not involve sex. So it was exciting for a young man, and he associated arousal with the sights and smells of a hair salon. A little hair tonic, who can resist?

The amazing part is that he finds someone who wants nothing more than he does—he wants to spend all his time in the salon, to live there night and day, and when he is there, he is the great seducer. They are in a blissful place, deeply entranced with each other. His lady love, Mathilde (Anna Galiena), is caught up in a fear that such a life that they lead cannot continue. He doesn’t quite explain to her that as long as they have the location, he will desire her—that is the error in his way, and the outcome is very sad.

A Cat in Paris (2011)

This petite movie was an Oscar nominee for Best Animated Feature Film last year--such a charming and different departure from the slick and highly polished products that come out of Hollywood.

The film is directed directed by the French animation team of Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagno, and it is wonderfully whimsical.  The images in “A Cat in Paris” are pointedly and delightfully off-kilter and out of proportion. Feet are much too small for bodies. Perspectives shift and slide. Apparently solid objects have a tendency to wobble. The laws of physics are brazenly flouted.

The cat and the little girl are our heroines--the cat is house cat by day, cat burglar by night.  She slinks off in the evening to join Nico, a human cat burglar.  The girl's mother is a police detective, and a major league bad guy has killed her father, and is after the rest of the family.  Never fear, the forces of good will prevail, but there is a nice amount of French farce in between to make the cartoon a romp of good fun.

My Wife is an Actress (2001)

This is a very French, very romantic, and wryly funny film starring Yvan Attal as himself and his very lovely wife, Charlotte Gainsbourg as herself.  When I read that on the envelope that came with the movie, I wondered why the heck I had put it in my queue--it sounded terrible.  The nature of my queue is that if I am not paying very much attention to it, something that I put into it a year or more ago pops up, and I have no recollection of how it might have ended up there to begin with.  That being said, this is a great example of how that can be a very good thing indeed.

Yvan (Attal) is a youngish sports writer who, through some improbable luck, finds himself happily married to the beautiful Charlotte, a fantastically popular movie actress. All is going swimmingly for Yvan--he loves his wife, she loves him, and aside from the more than occasional fan interrupting a meal they are sharing, all is well in Yvan's life.  That is  until a stranger plants the seeds of jealousy and doubt in his mind over his wife and her on-film lovers.  The stranger (who is an ex-boyfriend of his sister's) goes on at some length about the kissing, the on-screen nudity and sex, and how it must be very hard to watch all that. Up until then Yvan hadn't really thought about it, and that was working pretty well for him.  So first he goes her latest movie--he thinks her sex scene with another man is, well, sexy.  He takes an acting class, and the girls in the class are so impressed with his acting that they want to sleep with him.  When they kiss him on stage, they are really kissing him.  Then he panics. Meanwhile, Charlotte is in London, starring in a movie with a very seductive and sophisticated Terence Stamp. And Yvan can tell that if Charlotte would let something happen with her co-star, he wouldn't kick her out of his bed.  Soon misunderstandings pile upon misunderstanding until Yvan's marriage is on the verge of collapse.  Voila!  Just like that!  The beauty and the fragility of a good relationship once again exposed by the French.

The Girl From Paris (2001)

I loved this movie--and I love the place that the movie is set in.  Some of our closest friends have a sheep farm and make farmstead cheeses with the milk from their ewes.  In preparation for making a new type of cheese, a tomme (which is a washed rind aged cheese), they were planning a trip to the Hautes Alps in France to work with several different cheesemakers and invited us to come along.  It was spectacular, especially Eric Randu's cheese and family and chalet in the mountains.  Such a spectacular place to be.  And that is where this film is set.Its heroine, Sandrine Dumez (Mathilde Seigner), an unhappy urbanite drifting toward 30, who abruptly decides to follow her dreams and embrace the rural life.

In true French fashion, in order to qualify to get a farm she must first clear some bureaucratic hurdles, in particular a rigorous training program (telescoped here into the bloody slaughter of a pig and a daunting encounter with a giant combine). This is no place for dilletantes who want to make goat cheese and play the guitar, the instructor says. But Sandrine is practical and serious. After she buys a dairy farm in the Rhône-Alpes region from a grouchy old peasant, she sells her goat cheese over the Internet, and converts an unused cow barn into a rustic bed and breakfast.  The aforementioned grouchy farmer is at first jealous, then prone to sabotauge, and finally concedes that she is a far better farmer than he had any right to hope for, and vertainly doesn't deserve her goodness.  There are tense moments, but this being a French film, it all comes out alright in the end.

The Fairy (2011)

This movie will not suit everyone. It is a great example of what movies on disc and cable TV have brought in terms of breadth to the average movie watcher's viewing options. No longer are we hostage to the Hollywood (or Bollywood) blockbuster. Quite the contrary. If you look at what you can stream on Netflix, you are more likely to end up with a brainy documentary or a quirky foreign comedy than an action-packed drama with more guns than roses. This is an almost silly French-Belgian film that is surprisingly enjoyable to watch. One of my cousins said something very insightful about French films and I am going to repeat it--again. There is no point to this movie. If you are waiting for a lesson learned, you will be disappointed. The story here is about someone who is living below the mean, clerking at night in a low budget hotel in Le Havre. He meets 'the fairy', who offers him three wishes. Two of which he is able to come up with immediately, and one of which he saves. She seemingly grants him the two wishes, and so he is ready to leave his job and his old life to pursue her. Anytime you are seeking a magical creature, you are likely to be subjected to the improbable, and this film is no exception--the scenes are simple, the humor is slapstick and dependent both on timing and a suspension of belief--but if you can manage that (and it is asking a lot), it is fun to watch the couple romp to the end.

Mademoiselle Chambon (2009)

If you don't like movies with limited dialogue and smoldering emotions, run, do not walk, away from this movie. It is the sort of repressed love story that the French have mastered like no other film culture, and this is a spectacular version of the genre. Characters suppressing volcanic emotions that can be decoded only by reading expressions and body language give the movie a complexity and tension that transcend words--or, if you aren't into that sort of thing, make a trip to the concession stand seem like a good idea. The film examines a possible love affair and its consequences, with three main characters — Jean (Vincent Lindon), a mason; his wife, Anne Marie (Aure Atika), who works in a book factory; and Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain), their son’s unmarried grammar school teacher. The story is simple. The happily married Jean falls under the spell of Véronique after being invited to the class of his son, Jérémy, to talk about his occupation. Jean’s description to the schoolchildren of how to build a house was a lecture on how to build a comfortable, bourgeois life on a solid foundation, and it captures Véronique's imagination. She starts to look at him in a different way. The same happens for him when later he hears Véronique play the violin. He is transported by the romantic melody by the Hungarian composer Ferenc von Vecsey to a place that he cannot go without the music. They fall for each other--hard--and for reasons of their personalities, not their looks or their money or their status. The complication is that Jean is a traditional family man. He has a wife who is also his friend, a son he adores, and he is devoted to his frail 80-year-old father, whom he visits regularly in a retirement home. So a torrid love affair is not what he was looking for, and once his wife tells him she is again pregnant, he knows in both his heart andhis head that Véronique is not a long term possibility. But boy oh boy does it hurt. A questioning look exchanged and held for a half-second, the trembling of a lower lip, a stride that is a little too purposeful, a conversation that breaks into an uncomfortable silence: these are the signs of potentially life-altering choices and incipient chaos. And Jean's wife sees it as clearly as Jean and Véronique do. There are twists en route to the ending, where the inevitable must happen, reminding one to avoid falling for the impossible choices. Personal upheavals are as consequential in people’s lives as shattering world events--beware.

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.

Romantics Anonymous (2010)

This is it.  This movie is what I love about French romantic comedies. Painfully shy man meets overanxious woman.  They share a passion for chocolate and each other.  They promptly and appropriately fall in love.  Problems ensue (this is the French part) when they can't remain calm enough to build a linear relationship.  Instead they have one in fits and starts. Angélique (Isabelle Carré) is a gifted chocolatier who is so self-effacing that the merest compliment makes her faint--literally. To cope with her fear, she sings “I Have Confidence” (from “The Sound of Music”) to herself and attends 12-step meetings for people with social-anxiety disorder.  She is so timid she doesn't admit that she is the chocolatier everyone wants to find. Her male counterpart, Jean-René (the Belgian comic actor Benoît Poelvoorde), is the middle-aged owner of the Chocolate Mill, a failing enterprise whose products are deemed old-fashioned by those in the know. Jean-René is afraid to answer his own telephone, sweats so much when he is with Angélique he has to change shirts frequently, listens to self-help tapes at night, and sees a therapist who pressures him to take action--which is the plausible piece of how these two get together. It is typically French in that the two main characters are incredibly likable, and everyone wants them to get together.  We know they will, but the movie is a romp of a tale about how that happens.  I just loved it.

Queen of Hearts (2009)

I was recently at a wonderful family gathering in Baltimore. En route to the East Coast, I got delayed for quite a few hours in Chicago (it turns out that the Windy City was aptly named that day, and airplanes do not appreciate wind as much as other things that fly, especially when it gusts unpredictably and close to the ground). To pass the time, I watched a couple of movies that I was reasonably certain my spouse would appreciate being excused from viewing. I am someone who lives very much in the moment, so I couldn't help talking some about said movies, and one of my very favorite people who I see reliably when my husband's family gathers together said about French movies "It isn't that I don't like foreign movies. Not at all. It is that I don't like movies that lack a plot." I laughed out loud at the time, and I am still laughing. It is a very reasonable gripe about the classic French romantic comedy. And he has a very reasonable expectation for films. It is just that while this genre very much appeals to me, when he said that, I couldn't for the life of me think why that is. Since then, I haven't made any progress on that front, but if you like that sort of movie, this one is very fun (and there is plenty of playful sex to keep someone who finds that to be adequate compensation for a lack of a plot to be kept happy). Here is the basic plot: Valerie Donzelli plays Adele, a young Parisian who flings herself wholeheartedly adn histrionically into self-pitying despair when dumped by boyfriend Mathieu. Relocating to the living-room floor of abrasive, mysteriously eye-impaired cousin Rachel (Beatrice de Stael), who encourages her to use sex with strangers to get 'back on the horse', so to speak. She throws herself enthusiastically into this task, all the while taking for granted Pierre, an obvious Mr. Right. (Jeremie Elkaim does amusing quadruple duty as all these male characters). The absurdist humor harkens back to early Woody Allen movies with a French signature.