Review of The Women on the 6th Floor

We have of course been here before, many times. Nevertheless this is a feelgoods feelgood movie. Fabrice Luchini is arguably the best actor currently working to take on this kind of role, the slightly uptight, stuffed shirt businessman who discovers before it too late that life is for living. Jack Lemon brought this off brilliantly in Billy Wilder's Avanti and you don't compare actors with Lemon lightly. Natalia Verbeke - a name totally new to me - is also just right as the catalyst who brings out his dormant humanity. Yes, there is an element of sloppy writing - for example, at an early point in the proceedings Luchini tells Verbeke (who he has hired to replace his old maid, who quit in the first reel, triggering the rest of the film) that the building in which he lives with his wife, Sandrine Kimberlain, and two sons, has been owned by his family for generations and he himself was born there yet surely in all that time he would have ventured up to the sixth floor and seen the squalor in which the Spanish women who live there exist. He is rightly horrified when he does so and immediately pays a plumber double his fee to unblock the communal toilet. This was clearly necessary as a plot device for Luchini to reveal his genuine humanity and befriend these Spanish cleaners but something not so unlikely would have been preferable. Nevertheless this is a DELIGHT though I thought that Sandrine Kiberlain - an actress I've long admired - looked slightly unwell, possibly the result of her recent separation from husband Vincent Lindon. Apart from that I can't wait to buy the DVD.