My Piece of the Pie
Time Out New York Project: Issue #840, December 8-14, 2011
★★★☆☆
Dir. Cédric Klapisch. 2011. N/R. 109mins. In French and English, with subtitles. Karin Viard, Gilles Lellouche, Audrey Lamy.
France is in trouble. Not the country France — although, well, we’ll get to that — but a working-class woman (Viard, flailingly committed) who lives in the city of Dunkirk. At the start of Cédric Klapisch’s ambitious romance-satire, this spirited gal loses her job and attempts suicide. (Quite an introduction.) The man semiresponsible for her plight is Steve (Lellouch, like the love child of Edward G. Robinson and a proboscis monkey), a London-based French stockbroker whose shady megadealings resulted in the shuttering of the factory where France worked for years. Her let’s-end-it-all overreaction aside, France is determined to overcome this crisis, and through a number of coincidences — call it karma, or simply contrivance — she ends up working as Steve’s maid, after he moves to Paris to start his own firm.
From here, My Piece of the Pie settles into a light romantic-comedy groove: Steve’s kid from a previous relationship appears on his doorstep; France agrees to take care of him, so dad can do his dastardly business; and it’s clear that these two social and emotional opposites are headed for a roll in the hay. These scenes are all well performed and compelling, especially when the action is confined to Steve’s obscenely affluent apartment, but they’re still mostly a feint. Klapisch shows his hand after the film take a left turn into some proletariat call-to-arms shenanigans — there’s a reason she’s named France, see? — that feel egregiously out of place. A Euro gloss on Pretty Woman suddenly turns into Occupy Gaul.—Keith Uhlich
