Une employée modèle (2002) - film review

François Maurey is the managing director of a small but successful IT company.   Whilst driving home one night, he encounters a young woman, Florence, who begs him to protect her from her aggressive husband.   This intrusion into François’s life could hardly have come at a worse time.  He is on the point of divorcing his wife and he is being harangued night and day by a rival American firm him to sell one of his products, the revolutionary X27.   François tries to keep Florence at arm’s length but soon succumbs to her charms.  He gives her a job in his company and takes her as his lover.   Can it be a coincidence that at this point his life and his career suddenly begin to fall apart...?

Une employée modèle is a spectacularly poor attempt to emulate an old fashioned kind of American thriller, badly scripted and lacking any real inspiration both on the direction and acting front.  With its badly drawn characters and a risibly naive plot that reveals a total lack of understanding about the IT industry, the film is little more than a tedious compendium of tired clichés of the kind you’d be very lucky to find in a bad American movie these days.   It’s almost heart-wrenching to see actors of the calibre of François Berléand and Bruno Todeschini squandering their talents in such a juvenile and thoroughly vacuous endeavour as this.

© James Travers 2007

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