Ma part du gâteau (2011) - film review

France is a factory worker who lives in Dunkirk with her three daughters.  When her factory closes, she and her three colleagues find themselves without work.  She decides to go to Paris to look for a new job and finds a work placement as a housekeeper.  She is soon in the employ of a man who lives in a completely different world to her.  This man, Steve, is a successful stockbroker who divides his time between London and Paris.  How will France react when she learns that her new employer was partly responsible for the bankruptcy of her previous company and her present financial woes?

There is a distinct touch of the Ken Loaches about Cédric Klapisch’s latest film, a social comedy that makes a brave attempt to engage with the human consequences of the recent credit crunch and its aftermath.  This is the first time that the hydra of political posturing has reared its ugly heads in a Klapisch film and it is not a pleasant sight.  Despite his best intentions, the director gets a little carried away with his Marxist-Lenninist rhetoric and the film ends up looking horribly like a collision between a sick parody of a Ken Loach film and an even sicker send-up of Pretty Woman.  After twenty or so minutes, the film’s laboured didactic tone kills stone dead every vestige of humour and any sympathy we may have with the protagonists.  Karin Viard and Gilles Lellouche are two talented actors who give the film their best shot, but they are so ill-suited for their roles that the scripted archetypes they are lumbered with can only end up looking like bloated caricatures of the most risible kind.  The lightness of touch and authentic charcterisation that made Klapisch’s previous comedies so delightful are distinctly lacking in this film.

There is no question that Ma part du gâteau is timely and deals with a worthy subject.  It begins with an intriguing premise - what would happens if someone who was almost destroyed by the financial crisis gets to meet one of the (insert your own colourful expletives here) individuals who caused it?   The problem is that Klapisch fails to engage honestly with some difficult issues and merely uses these as the jumping-off point for what appears to be a still-born imitation of an American-style romantic comedy, with a copy of the Communist manifesto shoved unceremoniously down its gullet.    Klapisch has already explored the harsh realities of big business in his earlier comedy Riens du tout (1992), but that film had an authenticity and sharp satirical edge which are hard to discern in Ma part du gâteau.   As Klapisch tries to have his cake and eat it (imitating Hollywood and Loach as successfully as a seal pup doing an impression of a killer whale), all he has to offer his audience are a few crumbs of comfort and a meagre diet of stale clichés.  Oh what a lovely recession this is proving to be...

© James Travers 2011

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