The Women on the 6th Floor

In Paris in 1962 the stockbroker Jean-Louis discovers the Spanish maids living on the sixth floor of his building. They came from Spain after the civil war, share cramped rooms on that landing and have a broken toilet. He has the toilet fixed, and then moves up there himself. The film is not interested in the discovery of class. It is interested in two countries occupying one building: the distance between the bourgeois apartment and the sixth floor is a few metres, and the film keeps showing it as a staircase. The women's stories of fleeing Franco sit in the background. The form is warm comedy-drama: period décor, cramped attics, conversations in Spanish with subtitles. The tone is light and the subject is not. Philippe Le Guay directed. The film was an unexpected box-office success in France; Carmen Maura is in the cast, and the weight given to Spanish actors helped it find an audience in Spain too. Fabrice Luchini plays Jean-Louis, Sandrine Kiberlain his wife and Natalia Verbeke the young maid. Who it is for: viewers who like French period comedy and films that treat class difference with humour. Who it is not for: anyone expecting sharp criticism. The film ends by placing the bourgeois man in the role of rescuer, and the women's story becomes a vehicle for his change.