The Valet

Francis Veber builds every film on the same engine: a small, harmless, slightly hopeless man is fed into a powerful person's scheme, and the scheme collapses precisely because of his ordinariness. This is no exception. When a photograph of the wealthy Pierre Levasseur with his supermodel mistress reaches the papers, he has to convince his wife. His claim is that she was not with him at all but with the blurred man at the edge of the frame. The blurred man is a valet, François Pignon. Levasseur pays both the model and the valet to live as a couple for a month. Gad Elmaleh plays the valet, Daniel Auteuil the businessman, Alice Taglioni the model and Kristin Scott Thomas the deceived wife who actually owns the company. It runs eighty-five minutes and Veber uses them like clockwork. It was a box-office success. An English-language remake circulated for years, passing through DreamWorks and the Farrelly brothers, before finally being made for Hulu in 2022. Who it is for: viewers who like short, tidy French comedies built on misunderstanding. Who it is not for: anyone after depth. The characters stay at the level of types, and the film leaves its class arrangement exactly as it found it.