Hunting and Gathering

Herald Rating: * * * *

Verdict:

An odd-quartet rom-com is the kind of ensemble drama the French do so well

Disclosure: I've never much liked Audrey Tautou.  Her

Amelie

- film and character - drove me crazy with its studied winsomeness, and as the anorexic gold-digging waif Irene in

Priceless

she always seemed to be so much less than met the eye.

In this warm-hearted, generous-spirited comedy by   veteran Berri (the man who made the magnificent

Jean de Florette

films in the 80s), she finally creates a character with a plausible inner life - and she's a knockout.

She plays Camille, who pays the bills - including the rent on her small and comfortless attic room - by cleaning offices at night and by day follows her  passion, filling her sketchbook with beautiful drawings of anything   that catches her eye.

When she befriends Philibert (Stocker) a shy young blue-blood living downstairs, she meets his flatmate, the rough and ready Franck (Canet).

The latter is a chef with a big motorbike and an even bigger chip on his shoulder; he shows his soft side only to his ageing grandmother (Bertin).

It goes without saying that Camille will eventually penetrate Franck's hard shell, but the way it all unfolds avoids most of the platitudes of the genre. Adapting the novel by Anna Gavalda, a best-seller in France, Berri, who scripted it, has created a nice variant of the odd-couple rom-com, involving an odd quartet.    All four of the characters are, in different ways, stuck in some sort of rut and the alchemy of their interaction, facilitated by the fragile but ultimately resilient Camille, allows them to move on.

Held together by some excellent performances, (Canet, director of the excellent thriller

Tell No One

that was in the Showcase festival, is great) every character - unlike Amelie and Irene - seems real.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Audrey Tautou, Guillaume Canet, Laurent Stocker, Francoise Bertin

Director:

Claude Berri

Running time:

97 mins

Rating:

M, contains offensive language and sexual references

Screening:

Academy, Rialto