Monday, August 4 - Movies

The Age

Thursday July 31, 2008

Craig Mathieson

The Valet (2006)

Movie Extra, 2.30pm

The adroitly conceived comedies of veteran French filmmaker Francis Veber can range from the droll to the laugh-out-loud hysterical. 1998's The Dinner Game is the latter, The Valet the former. As always, the everyman at the centre is named Francois Pignon, played this time by stand-up comic Gad Elmaleh. Longtime Veber collaborator Daniel Auteuil, who played a Pignon in 2001's The Closet, is, in this film, a corporate chief photographed with his supermodel mistress (Alice Taglioni) who tells his majority shareholding wife that the young woman was with the third man in the picture, Elmaleh's parking valet. To preserve the deception, the beauty moves in with the unassuming, almost mournful, man, who barely notices because he has spent his life pining for his best friend (Virginie Ledoyen). The scenes in which Ledoyen, a great beauty, worries about how she compares to the catwalk vixen are unintentionally funny.

Come Drink With Me (1966)

ABC1, 2.10am

Vintage Shaw Brothers Studio wuxia (Chinese sword-fighting) flick about a young woman who recruits a warrior to rescue her kidnapped brother. -- CRAIG MATHIESON

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