ROSALIE BLUM
★★★★ ½
![Rosalie Blum (Noemie Lvovsky) is a woman who values a challenge.](/web/20161226194307im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/4/b/9/c/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt4aij.png/1481245919601.jpg)
M, 96 minutes. Opens Boxing Day
Director Julien Rappeneau
Stars Kyan Khojandi, Noemie Lvovsky, Alice Isaaz
We've come to expect a French feelgood movie for Christmas every year. This time, it's Rosalie Blum, a wistful comedy cleverly built on a chain of happy coincidences. Well, they eventually turn out to be happy. Watching them gradually reveal their nature to the benefit of all players is one of the film's major pleasures.
The film's star is Kyan Khojandi, a chunky, balding and rather hangdog figure who is now one of France's most popular comics. Director Julien Rappeneau cast him after seeing his work on the Canal+ sketch comedy series Bref, which can be sampled on YouTube if you speak French.
Khojandi plays Vincent, who is leading an uneventful life in the town of Nevers in central France. He's running the hairdressing salon he's inherited from his father and caring for his increasingly loopy and demanding mother, who lives in the apartment above his own.
He also thinks of himself as having a girlfriend even though he's seen little of her since she moved to Paris. Clearly, he needs shaking up, although this seems highly unlikely until the day he sets eyes on Rosalie Blum (Noemie Lvovsky), a local shopkeeper.
What's the attraction? If he knows, he's not telling. She's much older than he is and her fashion sense is non-existent. But behind her unflattering spectacles is the quizzically humorous look of a woman who welcomes a challenge.
It doesn't take her long to discover that Vincent is stalking her. Then she takes a decision that will change both their lives. She asks her niece, Aude (Alice Isaaz), to follow him and find out what he's up to. Naturally, Aude's friends, Cecile (Sara Giraudeau) and Laura (Camille Rutherford) want in on the assignment and suddenly the film takes on a screwball quality. Inspector Clouseau has nothing on these three.
It's Rappeneau's script but his chief talent lies in the balance that he brings to its disparate moods and points of view. It's funny, it's melancholy and it's sometimes both at once. For Aude, who's at odds with her wealthy family, life has stalled, as it has for Vincent. And Rosalie, too, is shadowed by events from her past. They're all reluctant to take the next necessary step, whatever that might be, until chance brings them together.
Much of what makes it work is in the playing. Lvovsky, who directed, co-wrote and starred in the equally offbeat comedy Camille Rewinds (2012), is full of the spirit of mischief – in a benign sense – and the fun in Khojandi's performance springs from his reading of Vincent's character rather than any desire to milk his bumbling for laughs. Isaaaz, too, has no difficulty finding the pathos in Aude's shambolic way of life. They all make terrific company.