Les Femmes du 6ème étage (2011) - film review

In the 1960s, Jean-Louis Joubert is a 40-something stockbroker who lives in an upmarket Parisian apartment block with his wife Suzanne.  With their children away at boarding school, the Jouberts live a dull, uneventful life and their marriage looks as though it may be starting to crumble.  Their new housemaid, a Spanish immigrant named Maria, soon livens things up when she lures Jean-Louis to the sixth floor of the building, which is where all the maids lives.  Here, Jean-Louis discovers a world he never imagined, home to a group of uninhibited Spanish women who, despite their straitened circumstances, are keen to hold onto their culture.  He develops a particular fascination for Concepción, a Spanish woman of his own age with a typically Latin temperament and an alluring savage beauty to match.  When she sees the change in her husband’s mood and behaviour, Suzanne immediately becomes suspicious and challenges him.  In retaliation, Jean-Louis decides to take a tiny little room on the sixth floor and exchanges his humdrum middleclass existence for one that promises freedom and the fulfilment of his pent-up desires.  Or so he thinks...

Those two mainstays of French cinema - the midlife crisis and a clash of cultures - provide the starting point for this ebullient social comedy which is likely to be one of the French film highlights of 2011.  As well as being highly entertaining, the film explores issues that are becoming ever important in France (if not the whole of western Europe), namely racial tolerance, the value of national identity and the growing gulf between the haves and the have nots.  It is imaginatively scripted and directed by Philippe Le Guay who, having won widespread acclaim for his brutal social drama Trois huit (2001), has since contented himself with mainstream comedies, Le Coût de la vie (2003) and Du jour au lendemain (2006).    Les Femmes du 6ème étage is by far Le Guay’s most inspired comedy to date.  It is not only well-written, well-directed and enthusiastically performed by a superb cast, but it also provides a thoughtful commentary on our own times.  The moral of the film is perhaps a little too obvious but it makes the point effectively - society and individuals are enriched, not impoverished, when different cultures come together.  In common with many of Le Guay’s previous films, there is also a far from subtle anti-capitalist subtext - money may make the world go round, but it does not necessarily make us happier.

The main treat offered by this film is a welcome return to form for the actor Fabrice Luchini, whose anarcho-intellectual presence in French cinema has been greatly missed in recent years.  Luchini has come to epitomise the strait-laced bourgeois intellectual who is easily led astray into more colourful milieux to find a new lease of life.  He is therefore the natural casting choice for the film’s lead character, a Gallic Reggie Perrin who is revived by a Catalan cultural collision.  Cast as Luchini’s on-screen wife for the third time is Sandrine Kiberlain, who has the thankless task of playing the unsympathetic missus and providing the prim and sober contrast to the Spanish temptresses that live in the attic.  The latter includes Carmen Maura, an actress of rare talent and celluloid-scorching charisma who has graced many a Pedro Almodóvar film, here making another long-overdue comeback to French cinema.  Just as striking is Natalia Verbeke, who plays the Spanish stunner who takes Luchini up the stairway to Heaven, both literally and metaphorically.  With such a strong principal cast, the film could hardly fail to please, but add to that a screenplay that crackles with wit and insight and the result just has to be one of the most enjoyable French comedies in ages.

© James Travers 2011

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