Mon meilleur ami
**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Daniel Auteuil, Dany Boon, Julie Gayet, Julie Durand
screenplay by Patrice Leconte & Jérôme Tonnerre
directed by Patrice Leconte
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover François (Daniel Auteuil) is an obnoxious antiques dealer without a friend in the world. This rather extreme fact lets you know that he's about to get his comeuppance, a life lesson in the form of an opposite number who will set him straight. Enter Bruno (Dany Boon), a far-too-nice cabbie who strangely volunteers to teach François sociability. That the plot hinges on a boring odd-couple helping each other is all you need to know about My Best Friend (Mon meilleur ami), the kind of thing Rob Reiner would make if he were French. Although it gamely suppresses the more bathetic elements of the story, they're there just the same: we're supposed to feel the warm good feeling of a jerk redeemed, and to that end, the film deploys every heart-tugging mechanism in the feel-good manual. That it doesn't milk them visually is less a tribute to the restraint of director Patrice Leconte than to his skill at playing a shell game with the audience.
In the grand tradition of milquetoast comedy, this one hinges on a bet: that François can't come up with a true friend in ten days–with an expensive Grecian vase he's bought at auction with his firm's money as the wager. The set-up of the vase MacGuffin is painfully obvious, though it's not half as bad as the character of Catherine (Julie Gayet), who isn't merely François's virtuous business partner but a lesbian, too. This means she will be an Inhuman Topical Object, wheeled in to deliver sickly speeches and show off the enlightened nature of the filmmakers. (That said, she gets off easier than the silent appendage playing her afterthought girlfriend.) But these are side issues: the big problem is that Bruno is as much a locus of condescension as he is one of sympathy. He has lovable quirks (specifically his obsession with memorizing facts–foreshadowing, anyone?) and is charmingly obsequious, yet My Best Friend goes out of its way to cast him in a pathetic light–enough so that when he accepts the magnanimous gesture his sort-of friend deals out at the climax to make amends, it negates the levelling that's supposedly been going on throughout the film.
As the bulk of the movie consists of François trying to learn from Bruno (and failing, "hilariously"), we're basically stuck with two sentimental devices meant to wring patronizing chuckles. The jerk's interpersonal cluelessness and Bruno's obliviousness to the exploitative nature of the relationship create mechanical comedy as well as mechanical pathos; they're funny and they're sad, except mostly they're just feeble. François attacking a middle-school 'friend' in desperation is supposed to show a glimmer of how much people hated him even then, while Bruno growing nervous at a quiz-show audition is to show how sadly unsure of himself he really is. Both of these things are played for dramedy, after which Bruno takes his charge to a football game, proving what a salt-of-the-earth guy he is and how François can learn from someone so unpretentious. Blecch.
My Best Friend earns minor points for introducing Bruno's disillusionment as the second-act crisis instead of as the big climax followed by a reconciliatory denouement. Alas, this just means that the film drags out that structure, essentially resulting in a half-hour denouement and a mawkish finale that tests our patience. In between, there is much talk of what friendship is and how to be nice to people, but it's as simple and inadequate as the surrounding narrative. Though I'm not well-versed in the films of Patrice Leconte, it's bizarre to know that this wet noodle comes from a director of reasonable stature: aside from a coolly dispassionate sheen that thankfully dials down the sentiment, you wouldn't know it was the work of someone noted for taking things terribly seriously. I suppose you could put this next to some Hollywood comedy and it might come out looking a little better, but that's like comparing Coke to Pepsi–no matter which one comes out on top, neither is going to do you much good.
THE DVD
IFC's stateside DVD release of My Best Friend sports a 2.35:1, 16×9-enhanced transfer that compensates for a certain softness with a suitable amount of nuance and depth; colours are perhaps a bit loud for such a subdued film. The Dolby 5.1 audio is similarly quiet in its achievement, not knocking you out but providing a sense of room tone and crowd buzz that allows the surround channels to be more than superfluous. The only major extra is "The Making of My Best Friend" (26 mins.), which is a lot like the movie itself in that it takes a superior route to the average destination of most featurettes. On the one hand, it's crisp and without surface sentimentality, and it doesn't assume you're floored by the on-set clips it feeds you. Scratch the surface, however, and you'll find every cliché of how everybody was great to work with, the shallow interest in the script, and Dany Boon joking that the Leconte was bad with actors. It's watchable–just not terribly edifying. The film's trailer rounds things out; trailers for Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman, This Is England, After the Wedding, and Private Fears in Public Places begin on startup.
95 minutes; PG-13; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); French DD 5.1; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; IFC
