Tu peux garder un secret? (2008) - film review

Delphine clearly wasn’t thinking of her longterm career plans when she let slip, in front of two of her colleagues, that she had been sleeping with her boss.  Within 24 hours, this titbit is known by just about everyone in the firm she works for, including her boss, who has never even heard of her.  To make matters worse, her boss, a married man, has indeed been having a torrid extra-marital affair, but with another woman.  Is this the end for little Delphine?

Tu peux garder un secret? brings together, for the first time on the big screen, the three stars of the Parisian stage hit Arrête de pleurer Pénélope and its sequel - Christine Anglio, Juliette Arnaud and Corinne Puget - but, alas, their combined efforts can hardly keep afloat this travesty of a Gallic rom-com for five minutes.   Alexandre Arcady’s latest cinematic Titanic manages to hit the proverbial iceberg barely before a single line of dialogue has been spoken, not that this comes as a surprise.  We can form a pretty good idea of what we are in for from the woefully unimaginative opening sequence - Sex in the City Lite (so Lite that you fill a hot air balloon with it).

Clichés by the skipload (Arcady must have been offered a job lot), jokes so laboured and banal that you can see them coming from the other side of the Atlantic, and situations so hackneyed, facile and exaggerated that you wonder whether the poor benighted souls who wrote the script have ever visited Planet Earth.  Certainly, the film’s portrayal of corporate cultural and male-female relationships bears scant, if any, approximation to reality.  With its three talented  and charismatic lead performers, Tu peux garder un secret? had the potential to be an entertaining romp that might even have had appeal outside France, but the opportunity was squandered and what we get instead is the most facile lowbrow comedy imaginable.  Not only isn’t the film remotely funny (except possibly for the one brief scene with Michaël Youn), it totally fails to hold the attention and you feel embarrassed just by watching it.  Just what an actor of the calibre of Pierre Arditi is doing mixed up in this fiasco is anyone’s guess...

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