Just because The Girl From Monaco’s got a serious filmmaker doesn’t mean it ain’t fluff. Anne Fontaine has previously been known for heavy, ponderous French dramas like Dry Cleaning, How I Killed My Father and Nathalie... You’d think her presence on this fizzy love triangle-cum-travelogue would demand a subversion of the genre. And though Monaco does prove slightly more inventive, the subversion is this: There is no subversion, or only slightly. You could say this was directed by dreaded farceur Francis Veber—he of the dreaded Gérard Depardieu-Pierre Richard comedies—and people would simply say they didn’t know he could direct comedy. Part Gallic riff on Jeeves and Wooster, part French Hitch,
Monaco pairs a middle-aged pseudo-lothario barrister (Fabrice Luchini)—sent to the scenic, ritzy sovereign city-state to defend a suspected murderess (Stéphane Audran)—with a stiff Arab bodyguard (Days of Glory’s Roschdy Zem). After Zem handily dispatches with one of Luchini’s unwanted scores (a brief but reliably awesome Jeanne Balibar), Luchini sets his eyes on the titular fille (Louise Bourgoin)—a bubbleheaded, blond bombshell weather girl and (of course) aspiring actress. And Zem, in addition to being killer with the ladies, is also one of her former beaus.
To its credit, things don’t go quite as expected, though not so unexpected that the genre has been redefined. In essence, Fontaine transforms herself into a fairly expert maker of fizz, reiterating the stereotype of Monaco as a place of luxurious escapism and only hinting at a deeper social subtext through the largely race-blind casting of Zem.
Sure, he’s subservient, but he’s also a badass lady-killer. And it also has an ace in the hole with Bourgoin, a real-life weather girl who plays the ditziness to the hilt while sneakily suggesting a deeper intelligence. Her exuberance, as Bourgoin subtly plays it, is less about idiocy than a genuine passion, and her chatter has a disarming eloquence to it.
This slight change-up is really all The Girl From Monaco has to offer; otherwise it’s business as usual, only with some naughtier jokes. (Banging his new girl all night, Luchini shows up to court hoarse.) And though the ending is one of the last places you’d expect a film like this to wind up, it’s still, you know, fluff. Not that that’s a bad thing, mind. B-
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