[title]
A little less realist than ‘Mary Poppins’, director Lorraine Levy’s undemanding French-language romantic comedy concocts an amusing, laughably cosy, French enclave in ‘polite, nice, clean’ South Kensington. ‘Londoners call it “frog alley”,’ says Bernadette Lafont’s maternal Yvonne, introducing new arrival Parisian divorcee Vincent Lindon to the regulars in her ersatz SW7 bistro.
The rudimentary plot, adapted from a book by the director’s brother, plays an ‘odd couple’ variant, pairing him in a mock ‘marriage’ in a shared mews house with neurotic, rule-making, fellow single-parent Pascal Elbé, from whom Lindon tries to keep secret his love affair with sexy reporter Virginie Ledoyen. Trading mainly on the truculent charm and romantic vulnerability of 49-year-old domestic French star Lindon, it’s local colour is almost entirely architectural – and touristic – save for veteran Richard Syms’s bizarrely Dickensian bookshop owner and an untranslated cab driver who tells Lindon to stop nervously tapping his door: ‘It’s a taxi, not an ’orse!’