You won't be disappointed!

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

A bitter-sweet bit of French male fantasy, with enough wisdom and honesty to acknowledge there's a difference between fantasy and reality. Jacques is middle aged and lonely, having been dumped by his wife five months earlier. He responds by trying to behave as if he's fine, but his mess of an apartment tells otherwise. So he answers an ad for a housekeeper, and discovers the utterly sexy and adorable 20 year old Laura who gradually works her way past Jacques' emotional walls, into first his bed, and then, perhaps, his heart (why she'd fall for him is left a bit loose and hazy). What raises this above the familiar are the lovely performances by the two leads, and Berri's willingness not to try to make the film more than it is – a simple tale of two very different people finding each other for a brief moment in the journeys of their lives.

A housekeeper, young and attractive, got into a relationship with her employer. It is because of her miserable situation of no where to stay? Or a true love happening? I doubt someone can give a clear answer. Maybe that's the nature of relationship. Something happens as it does.What a great movie although a little sort of somber with the artistic twist. Maybe that's the philosophy of life. There is something unexpected however we cannot do anything about it. Why not let us face it with smile... Forget about age of the characters. That is probably the shallow excuse to let those unexperienced people pretend they have understood what the director would like to deliver...Highly recommended for those are still hoping but have to face the fact that life is not merely what people can hope for.

I almost gave up on this one forty minutes in. Don't you do that. The ending is superb.Premise: working class girl gets dumped by her boyfriend and seeks work by housekeeping.Well, that can lead to something better if you keep house for the right person.Jacques (Jean-Pierre Bacri) who recently got walked out on by his wife, and who, not so incidentally looks sixty--well, fifty-five--(actually he was barely fifty when this was made, but you get the point) gets his ad for a housekeeper answered by Laura (Emilie Dequenne) who is twentysomething--a young twentysomething.I guess there is not much else to say, and to be honest I decided I would force myself to watch the inevitable. But the director is Claude Berri who directed two of the best movies I ever saw: Manon of the Spring (1986) and Jean De Florette (1986).And so I stayed with it. At about the fifty minute mark the movie started to get interesting. I could feel that old guy/young girl love affair was going to take an unexpected fork in the road. (As Yogi said, if you come to a fork in the road, take it. The players have no choice.) Obviously, old guy/young girl can end only one way: young girl leaves old guy for young guy. This is biology. It will be painful.Claude Berri knows all this, and probably a lot better than I do. And so guess what? Well, I won't tell. But you will find that the last thirty-some minutes of this sexy romantic comedy delightful, and especially the very, very clever and most satisfying ending.Just prior to that Laura asks Jacques for his blessing. He won't give it, but she is right: he should. And then when we get the final "life is so...lifelike" grimace on Jacques's face, we can only smile.Emilie Dequenne is delightful as the strangely wise and very natural Laura, and Jean-Pierre Bacri is winning as the old guy who knows better, but on reflection should thank his lucky stars.(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)

Claude Berri's Une Femme de Ménage (Housekeeper) takes us to a familiar world of contemporary French cinema: a casual, chic quartier of Paris where a successful fifty-something jazz record producer named Jacques (Jean-Pierre Bacri) lives in a very comfortable flat that's a very big mess because his wife has left him. He answers a notice tacked up on a neighborhood café and before long Laura (Émilie Dequenne), a twenty-something with a perfect, ripe body and cooperative good nature equally in evidence, is not only coming twice a week to clean and iron, but, because her boyfriend kicks her out, has moved in. Next thing you know she's offering that body to Jacques and when his estranged wife Constance (played in a tortured cameo by director Catherine Breillat) appears at the door and begs for a reconciliation, he decides to escape on a two-week vacation in Brittany at his artist-chicken farmer friend Ralph's place, and Laura begs to be taken along.There is something charming about this moment when Jacques and Laura head for the seacoast, Laura packing the vacuum cleaner (`respirateur' in French) to practice (she's been using a broom, so she can enjoy hip-hop on the boom box; he's told her she must master the `respirateur' if she's going to get more work) - and insisting on getting herself a haircut and dye job enroute. She's very much a work in progress, and the uncertainty of her relationship with Jacques is interesting. It's so absurd you half believe it might work.Laura is eager to please and so docile and loving, poor Jacques would have a new mate for sure if he didn't mind one twenty-five or thirty years younger whose taste runs to loud pop, junky TV, and trashy magazines. The dialogue in the car defines the uncertainty. He doesn't love her -- he'd be a fool to - but he likes having her around.Ralph (Jacques Frantz) provides a whimsically eccentric note - he paints portraits of his pet chickens and then serves them for dinner; the house smells like a barnyard. But it also turns out, when Laura snoops in Ralph's bedroom and finds a ring with Jacques' name on it, that Constance has been there recently in her wanderings and has slept with Ralph.The beach is what separates Jacques and Laura. She loves the water; he hates it. He covers up and reads while she plunges, and then she becomes a regular in volleyball games with two teams of well built young men. Late at night she insists that Jacques take her dancing. He meets an old woman friend there - also just abandoned by her mate. . . but this sounds more complicated than it is. What happens is that when Jacques says he's about to go back to Paris, where Laura, who can be anything she wants here, is only his housekeeper, Laura finds a young man, and is as ready to pair off with him as she was with Jacques.Jacques meets the young man's mom on the beach. She's getting divorced. He's sympathetic. He goes for a swim to keep mom company. He gets a cramp in the water. She helps him out. Maybe they'll become a couple. THE END.It's too bad this novel adaptation by the talented M. Berri trails off this way. There is real fun in the sense of possibility Laura's voluptuous appearance provides. In French movies, old, ugly men are deemed attractive: note that Laura's cute new boyfriend doesn't even have a speaking part. He's just a walk-on - or rather a run-off: he lopes down to the ocean with Laura and that's the last we see of him. This alone makes Housekeeper a fresh vision for American viewers.However, there's hardly anything profound here, despite the French point of view, nor can Laura, whose nice body and youth are her chief coping skills, be seen as a liberated woman in the mold of Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim. Femme de Ménage is fun, but there's something hasty and condescending about it. An Eric Rohmer story probably wouldn't have the uneasy class aspects of Laura's inappropriateness for Jacques: age would the only factor (compare Claire's Knee). To see how hasty the story is, think of the sensitive and profound character study of a lonely man in Claude Sautet's 1992 Un Coeur en Hiver.