Maid in Paris

Sunday 8 July 2012

The continuing infatuation with the Upstairs, Downstairs dynamic in drama, the old dance between toffs and servants, is something of a puzzle.

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FILMS OF THE WEEK: The Women On The 6th Floor (12A), The Hunter (15) Reviewed by Demetrios Matheou

On the surface, films like The Help and Albert Nobbs are appalled at the treatment of the serving classes of yesteryear; but these films, along with Downton Abbey on television, also hungrily feed off nostalgia and our pleasure in the fetishistic details of service – shining the silver, and all that. It's rather muddled, milord.

The latest in this mini-genre was a big hit in France, which means that it is noticeably uncomfortable expressing social injustice – the French tend to do politics better for real than in their movies. Indeed, The Women On The 6th Floor is a Pretty Woman fairytale, in which the maid and her employer (rather than the prostitute and her client) overcome obstacles of class, nationality and age to fall in love. It's charming, occasionally amusing and quite preposterous.Paris, 1960. Wealthy stockbroker Jean-Louis Joubert (Fabrice Luchini) and his wife Suzanne (Sandrine Kiberlain) live in stuffy and insular luxury in his inherited townhouse. When their aged housekeeper suddenly leaves them, Suzanne is informed by the ladies who lunch that "Brittany maids are over". Better are the servants streaming into France from Franco's Spain, who charge less than the French and even work Sundays; although they do insist on attending Mass. Suzanne quickly finds Maria (Natalia Verbeke), who merely has to pass her husband's boiled egg test. It is, of course, perfectly timed, winning her a job and sowing the seeds for his infatuation. And so Maria joins the other Spanish maids living in the attic floor of the building.The early stages of the film are the most engaging, as Jean-Louis's froideur is thawed first by Maria, then the whole community living in his rafters, whose squalid conditions he sets out to improve. His transformation from boss to benefactor to friend takes place with his vacuous socialite wife completely in the dark.The action ought to remain on the level of gently comic satire. Its descent into full-blown romance really doesn't work, not least because Luchini is more than 20 years older than Verbeke and looks it, while his French fastidiousness and her Latin effervescence couldn't be less compatible. This challenge to credulity does the film no service.Willem Dafoe is the title character in The Hunter, an unusual, gripping, Australian-made eco-thriller. After a sighting of the supposedly extinct Tasmanian Tiger, the mysterious Martin (Dafoe) is hired by a biotech company to find and kill the animal, bringing back tissue samples. He rents a room from a family on the edge of the wilderness, pretending to be a scientist studying Tasmanian Devils. But his presence still causes a rumpus, as he finds himself mistrusted by local loggers and environmentalists, not to mention his own employers. Based on the novel by Julia Leigh, the film works as a thriller, a character piece about a loner who slowly learns how to connect, and a reflection on the relationship between man and nature. The gaunt, appropriately fit and compelling Dafoe is the glue to all these facets. Solid support is offered by Sam Neill, as a guide with his own dodgy agenda, and Frances O'Connor as the woman whose family slowly humanises the stranger in their midst.

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