Odd Couple

Patrice Leconte's My Best Friend makes for less than thrilling company.

by Sam Adams

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

François Coste (Daniel Auteuil) has everything he wants: money, power and respect, or at least enough of the first two that people feign the last. A cold-blooded antiques dealer who thinks nothing of dropping by a funeral to remind a grieving widow that her husband's furniture won't do anybody any good just sitting around the house, he thrives on a lack of conscience or connection. At least he does until the night his business partner, Catherine (Julie Gayet), points out that he doesn't have any friends.

Preposterous, huffs François, sweeping his arm around the dinner table filled with what he takes to be his inner circle. But as they reveal with alarming ease, they not only don't like François but frankly detest him as a vain, self-interested boor who doesn't know the first thing about friendship. Instead of pitying him, Catherine plunges the knife deeper: She'll bet the expensive Greek vase François has just acquired that he can't produce a single close friend by the end of the month.

François has an opposite number, Bruno (Dany Boon), an amiable but awkward taxi driver who spends his spare time memorizing facts from TV quiz shows. The story of how these two odd socks end up as best friends is the stuff of classic light comedy: It's tantalizing to think what Preston Sturges might have done with such a premise, or even a scattershot artisan like Rob Reiner.

Patrice Leconte, however, seems to be under the impression that he's making a serious movie, or at least one substantially less absurd than it ought to be. The fundamental contrivance of the plot rubs uneasily against the melancholy of a scene like one where François desperately tracks down the man he remembers having been his closest friend in grammar school, only to be told with surprising viciousness that every boy in the class found him smug and intolerable. The movie's characters act with an arbitrariness attributable only to farce, but Leconte plays it straight, as if any of us might wake up tomorrow and have to produce our best friend at a moment's notice.

Boon, at least, seems to sense what the movie ought to be, giving his scenes a shot of energy with his incessant recitation of half-remembered trivia. But Auteuil plays François' prickly anxiety too close to the skin. He's not enough of a jerk for us to take delight in watching him squirm, but neither is he amiable enough for us to root for his deliverance.

Building to a climax on the set of the French version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, My Best Friend styles itself as a pop-savvy comedy with a few lessons up its sleeve. But too many jokes go over like lead balloons, leaving only a few tattered morals and a sense of time ill spent.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

MY BEST FRIEND

Directed by Patrice Leconte
An IFC Films release
Opens Friday at Ritz Five