My Best Friend (2006)

Catherine (Gayet) refuses to believe that her business partner the unlikeable Fran ois (Auteuil) has a best friend so she challenges him to set up an introduction. Scrambling to find someone willing to pose as his best pal Fran ois enlists the services of a charming taxi driver (Boon) to play the part.System Requirements:Run Time: 95 minutes Genre: COMEDY UPC: 796019805391 Manufacturer No: 80539 Product Description

Near flawless film from France

My, these comments are verbose - so I will keep mine short!!

This movie is like a bottle of Beaujolais: light, sweet, goes with every occasion!

With the exception of the long-suffering girlfriend's role, this film illustrates very universally appreciated concepts on the notion of "friendship." Namely: how do you know when you actually have got one?

This movie offers a very clear and consice answer to that question. And the response is so humorously laid out in one of the last scenes of the movie, I was literally crying from laughing so hard in the theatre.

You can easily put this film in the "romantic comedy" section since friendship serves as the basis for so many great loves. This film merely singles out friendship from everything else and, then, asks us to consider not only "who are your friends?", but also, "what is most important in your life?". July 13, 2008

Good...

French film with English subtitles. Set in Paris in current times. François Coste, played by Daniel Auteuil, is a successful antique dealer. At his birthday dinner with business associates, he mentions that a famous art collector had a mere 7 attendees at his funeral. The subject turns to Francois - and the group states that Francois would be lucky to have anyone show up at his funeral - he's appalled by these remarks. They proceed to tell him that no one really likes him outside of business dealing. He's shocked by this harsh feedback. His business partner proceeds to bet him that in 10 days he cannot turn up a "best friend."

Francois turns from his obsession with his business to deep introspection and a search for a best friend. His parents are both dead. He is divorced. He does not have a relationship with his daughter. He does not have an intimate relationship with anyone except his material "things." He comes across a "character" driving a taxi cab who helps him with his social and friend making skills and the story moves along to a point where the cab driver becomes Francois' only friend.

Daniel Auteuil plays the role Francois magnificently. A man of few words. Not all that comfortable with people or in crowds - a loner most comfortable on his own - but struggles with his inability to connect with others. You begin to get close to Francois and sympathize with his burden as the movie moves along - you can feel his discomfort and his anxiety. Breezy, brooding film is just over 1.5 hours long. If you loved Daniel Auteuil in "Un Coeur en Hiver (A Heart in Winter), you'll like this film.
June 23, 2008

Good idea, very poorly executed

Don't be taken in because the premise of this film is a good one. It is, but that does not a good film make.

Comedies require a well-honed script and masterful direction. Sadly, this poorly executed film has neither. Leconte, a good director in other genres, does not deliver in his comedic farces (Les Bronzes series being another example).

The comedic timing is terrible. Some jokes are telegraphed. Some are re-hashed from other movies. Others just sit there as if they were giving you time to laugh. The plot has messy subplots (the allergic daughter, the lesbian co-owner) and just does not develop or envelope the viewer. It isn't funny and it isn't believable for a second.

Compare this to any comedy by Billy Wilder (Some Like it Hot, A Foreign Afair, etc.) or by Leconte's compatriot, Francis Veber, a true GENIUS at French comedy (Le Diner de Cons, Le Placard, Les Comperes, La Chevre, La Grande Blonde, etc.) and you'll see the difference in their tight scripts, great comedic acting and timing, with each joke leading to the next one.

Watching Mon Meilleur Ami twice would be cruel and unusual punishment, not a good sign for a comedy. April 28, 2008

A FRIEND FOR A LONLY MAN.

MY BEST FRIEND (Dir: Patrice Leconte, France 2006).

In "My best friend", Monsieur Françoise Coste (Daniel Auteuil), is a solitaire Marchant, that with his partner Catherine (Jullie Gayet), attend an auction, hence calls its attention, a black vase with Greek figures about the friendship (the vase used to contained the tears of a friend). Coste wins in the auction the vase, by which pays a stratospheric price of 2.00000 Euros. That same night, is held an informal dinner with his dealers friends, where M. Coste stresses that he attended to a funeral of a colleague where only about seven people were in the church. Somebody reply that probably to M. Coste's funeral nobody will attend because he doesn't have any fiend.
He is flouting that assertion, and when asked to mentioning the name of one friend, not colleague or client, he is paralyzed, Catherine bet the vase with M. Coste, invited to displayed, in the period of 10-day his "best friend. "
The loneliness of contemporaries men is the landscape of this Leconte story. Bruno the taxi-driver who has collecting historic facts and trivial, dates, events, authors, with aspiring compete in one of this television shows knows, that his three "S": smile, sincerity and sympathy, although them work in their taxi-driver business, that do not help in every days life. The friendship, this form of get in touch with people mirroring the bond of blood or heritage, comradely, without necessarily have a sexual motive, it is almost disappearing. Men do not use to be so friendly any more with one or two people. Women do all the time. Men do not. They are massively "friends", but the one or two, paralyzing them before the possibility of what it can comment or, in the worst cases of what he can feel. One does not choose brothers but friend we do, so is one of the main issues of this very good film of Laconte.
The evolution gave us a brain too large, for the basic functions of an organism, eating, sleeping, reproduced, the reason for this is the socialization, verbal and non-verbal languages, the neurons in mirror, to "read the mind" of another to make coherent my interaction. And yet, Laconte said, despite having a brain equivalent a very sophisticate and expensive car, we, men, use that fancy machine only to go to "seven & eleven", and return to our bedroom to sigh because our loneliness.

April 11, 2008

My Best Friend

An interesting insight to French life and what is thought of as excess over there, but not very original on the subject of friendship. See The Closet for a much better treatment of the issues. March 26, 2008

More reviews at Amazon.com ...