Claude Berri is a director who often seems on the verge of becoming a name outside France but somehow doesn't quite make it. His films are interesting - One Leaves, The Other Stays - to excellent - Lucie Aubrac with very little dross. Now he's taken a popular French novel and cast Audrey Tautou in a lead for which she's almost but not quite suited. She plays a gifted anorexic artist who has elected to work as a cleaner to her mother's disappointment. She becomes friendly with an eccentric aristocrat, Laurent Stocker, who lives in an immense apartment which he shares more or less unaccountably with a surly chef, Guillaume Canet. When he realizes that Camille (Tautou) is ill Philbert (Stocker) takes her to live in his apartment and nurses her back to health, this allows for the Benedict and Beatrice element between Tautou and womanizer Canet who also has an elderly grandmother in hospital. Against the odds the three form a bond and bring the grandmother into the menage when she leaves hospital and that's about it. Stocker, who generates all of the action tends to become low man on his own totem pole so that his own development as an actor who finds his own romance takes something of a back seat to Tautou and Canet. Never less than interesting it doesn't quite make it to the next level.
Review of Hunting and Gathering
