Okay, you're a producer and I'm pitching to you: There's these two guys, coming up to middle-age, each has kids and is separated/divorced. They decide to share a house/apartment. That's just about where you'd stop me because 1) I'm no Neil Simon and 2) Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau are not available. Pity you stopped me because if you hadn't I could have said that this is different because instead of what are admittedly great one-lines this scenario has warmth, charm and romance in any order you like. Vincent Lindon and Pascal Elbe (no slouch as a writer himself) are inch-perfect as the leads and Bernadette Lafont atones for all those new wavelet pretentious tosh with which she became associated and contributes a wonderful supporting role as the French Restaurant owner cum friend of the principals. In France currently there are three twenty/thirty -something actresses working regularly and this movie has the best of them which means it's not sluttish Sagnier (Ludo), twee Tautou (Audrey) but lovely Ledoyen (Ginny) and if at 31 she is a tad young for Lindon, now in his fiftieth year, I'm not complaining and he sure as hell isn't. With hindsight it may be the wrong time - two French students have just been horribly murdered here - to release a movie about the joy to be found for expat French in 'frog alley' (the area of South Kensington where they tend to pitch their tents) and maybe they should have thought twice about having a Bookshop specialising in French books for French people called The French Bookshop. There are, as it happens, two French Bookshops in South Kensington and both, not unnaturally have French titles - would you, for example, expect to see in Paris a shop called Libraire Anglais. Apart from minor cavils of this sort this is definitely out of the right bottle and is time well spent.
Review of My Friends, My Love
