Caught by tabloid paparazzi with his mistress Elena, a famous and beautiful fashion model, billionaire Pierre Levasseur tries to avoid a divorce by inventing a preposterous lie. He uses the presence of a passerby in the photo to claim to his wife that it's not him Elena is seeing but the other man, one François Pignon. Pignon is a modest little man who works as a parking valet. To make the story convincing, Elena has to move in with Pignon.
23 Feb The Valet (2006)
Seductive Word Surprises
Needing something lightly comic, Veber was my man.
His ‘The Closet‘ was trivial, but few trivial things are amusing and fondly recalled. Here, with a different actor, is the same character with much the same quality.
I won‘t bother you with the story. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the way the humour is designed. Essentially all the humour is in the lines. There is no physical comedy here and almost no visual comedy. It is mostly in the dialog. Here is the trick: where other comedy is episodic and/or depends on a zany pace, this has pretty much a normal world, and normal pace. You cannot read the warning signs that a joke is coming. It could appear at any moment, and does from the very beginning.
So very early in the game we are trained to engage ourself very closely and pay attention. This is painless because the world we invest in is so light. We need erect no barriers. Because we open ourselves so, we anticipate what might be funny, investing in the possibility. The form of the thing enlists us in making funny.
This is easy to test. I believe it to be true, and honourably delicate in the way it helps us live.
Posted in 2010
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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