Priceless

If you are sympathetic with characters like Vivian in Pretty Woman and Holly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, you’ll love Audrey Tautou as Irene in the 2006 French Comedy, Priceless. More like Holly than Vivian, Irene isn’t an obvious prostitute. But she is a loose woman, looking for a sugar daddy to pay her bills, so that she can live the rest of her life in comfort and ease, using her youth, beauty, and sexuality as weapons in the war of the sexes.

She’s snagged a wealthy, wealthy man, who is ready to propose and keep her in the manner to which she has become accustomed. Enter Gad Elmaleh as Jean, a bartender at a sleepy hotel bar, who Irene mistakes for a wealthy option to her much older almost fiance, who is sleeping upstairs. They have a sweet flirtation that turns into more, and the next thing you know, they’re waking up together in the most expensive suite in the hotel (because bartenders always have the master keys, and know which rooms are vacant in beautiful hotels in the French Riviera). The thought that a gold-digger who is as fashionably knowledgeable as Irene, would mistake a cheap hotel uniform tuxedo for the type of superior tuxedo owned by a wealthy entrepreneur, or perhaps the son of inherited wealth, might be believable to some, but not to anyone who has ever worn a cheap uniform tux in a hotel, restaurant, or bar. Ahem.

Setting that aside, and the morality of her behavior, and the fact that when she discovers that her new lover is in fact, poor, and that her liaison with him has cost her the marriage she had been cultivating, she decides to show him, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that she is out of his league, by bankrupting him in the course of one meal…a meal where she orders the most expensive things on the menu, even though she doesn’t like them. Jean is all in. He knows he cannot keep this up, knows that the second the money stops, she will be gone. He doesn’t care a bit. He is so infatuated with Irene that he transfers his money from his savings into his checking account, so he can blow off years of his savings just to spend a few hours with her. At the end of the evening, in desperation, as she is ready to leave, he finds a loose Euro coin in his pocket, and gives it to her, if she will just stand there and let him look at her for 10 more seconds. She takes the coin. 10 seconds later, she’s gone.

Anyone less charming than Tautou would take this role and make it what it should be…one of a mean, desperate woman who has no faith in herself or her fellow human beings. But, like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, she is charming and lovely, and once he backs off and she sees him in another role (now that of gigolo, just like the character Paul in Tiffany’s, he’s now the kept man of an attractive older woman), she becomes his friend and shows him the tools of the trade, and how to get the most money for his time.

Mostly they can’t keep away from each other, and indeed, it’s a charming, sweet movie, with a sort of seamy underbelly, since at its heart, it’s about youth selling itself for security, and the desperation of those who are no longer young and beautiful, to pay great sums of money to fool themselves that they are still attractive to those who are. Believe it or not, aside from everything critical and cynical I just said, I actually liked this film. It was cute and fun. If you like a frothy romantic comedy, and are willing to ignore the seedier side of it all, I highly recommend this film. Also, the fact that it’s in French doesn’t hurt. Nothing sounds quite so desperate or slimy, when spoken in French.