By James Bowman on 7.25.07 @ 12:02AM
Daniel Auteuil has one of the best faces an actor has ever been blessed with.
Daniel Auteuil has one of the best faces an actor has ever been
blessed with. It can express at the same time both the careless
arrogance and insensitivity of wealth or power and an innocence and
vulnerability that are almost child-like. That makes the part of
Francois Coste in Patrice Leconte's new film, My Best
Friend (Mon Meilleur Ami), the role he was born to
play. Francois is a gallery owner in Paris who has no friends.
Actually, it's worse than that. Someone once said about former
Senator Phil Gramm that even his friends don't like him. Well,
that's Francois's predicament too. He has lots of friends, but they
all hate him.
He doesn't know this, however, until his business partner,
Catherine (Julie Gayet) -- a woman with whom he has worked closely
for years without ever knowing that she lives with a lesbian
partner -- challenges him to name his best friend. If he can't come
up with one in ten days, the expensive Greek vase he has just
bought with the company's money against her advice will be hers.
The vase acts as a symbol of friendship in the film. It was
supposedly made by someone to commemorate the death of a friend so
that he, the surviving friend, could fill it with his tears. The
decorative frieze on the outside tells the story of the friendship
of Achilles and Patroclus.
After trying a couple of the names in his address book and
finding that they don't want to be considered his friend at all,
let alone his best friend, he decides to look up the man whom he
thought of as his best friend in grade school but whom he hasn't
spoken to in decades. Surely, youthful friendships are the longest
lasting? But when he finds him, living in a Paris suburb, Luc
Lebinet (Philippe Du Janerand) brutally informs Francois that he
wants nothing to do with him. "Luc, we were best friends," Francois
pleads. "You can't have forgotten."
"I haven't forgotten," says Luc. "We were worst enemies. I hated
you. The whole class hated you. You were a smug little s*** then,
and you're a smug little s*** still."
While searching fruitlessly for a friend anywhere in his life,
he notices that Bruno Balanchine (Dany Boon), the cab-driver who is
shuttling him around Paris, seems to make friends wherever he goes,
and he asks him to teach him how to make friends. The most
important thing, says Bruno, is to be sympathique, a
French word to which the subtitler's English translation,
"sociable," scarcely begins to do justice. I would have thought
that the English word "sympathetic" has taken on a lot of the
meaning of its French cognate precisely because we have no other
word that means what it means. Anyway, you will probably have seen
where this is going. Though Francois has only limited success in
learning to be sympa, he and Bruno become friends. They go
to a soccer game together and then home to dinner with Bruno's
charmingly sweet old parents (Jacques Mathou and Marie Pillet).
When the old couple learn that Francois is an antiques dealer,
they ask him to have a look at Aunt Jacky's furniture in the attic
to see if it might be worth anything. Francois picks out a table
and offers them 10,000 Euros on the spot. Later, when Bruno helps
him wrestle the table up the stairs of his chic Parisien apartment,
Francois reveals that it is really "early Woolworths" and quite
worthless. Why then did he pay 10,000 Euros for it? asks Bruno.
"To make them happy," says Francois.
"You pay to make people happy?" asks Bruno
"Don't you?"
Clearly Francois still has some way to go in learning how to
make friends, as we also see in the appalling way he chooses to
demonstrate to Catherine and others that he does have a best friend
and so stake his claim to have won the bet. The twist comes as we
gradually realize that Bruno, though he is very sympa, has
no friends either. He has been betrayed by his own best friend,
which makes his subsequent betrayal by Francois all the more
wounding. Nervous, insecure and solitary in his ways, Bruno mirrors
in his own life the part of Francois that he is trying to fix.
Whether or not their friendship can be patched up, whether or
not either of them can learn to be a friend at all, are questions
that ultimately hinge on the artificial device of Bruno's
appearance on the French version of Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire? and needing to call Francois as his "lifeline."
This is a gain in drama at the cost of a certain amount of realism,
but the film is still an enjoyable and sometimes moving portrayal
of friendship that is very well worth seeing.
topics:
Business, NATO
