A Perfect Plan (2012)

A Perfect Plan arrives from 2012, a French romantic farce in which a successful woman named Isabelle, played by Diane Kruger, resolves to marry a stranger and divorce him promptly, all to sidestep a family curse that dooms every first marriage. The stranger is Jean-Yves, a travel-guide editor played by Dany Boon, and the machinery of the plot drags him through Copenhagen and Moscow in service of a scheme any reasonable adult would abandon in the first reel. The film is light, brisk, and entirely untroubled by the weight of the world outside its frame.

This is a romantic comedy of the old school, and it makes no apologies for the fact. The cast is uniformly white and European, and the film has no interest in commenting on that, which is less a failing than a description. Race never enters the conversation. Neither does class, though the characters are comfortable professionals who could presumably afford the topic. There is no environmental anxiety, no economic critique, no meditation on bodies or brains or contested history. The film's single gesture toward a social idea is Isabelle's insistence on controlling her own romantic destiny, and even that is folded neatly into a wedding-and-happily-ever-after resolution before the credits roll. Any subversion is promptly defused.

What remains is craft and charm, deployed without agenda. The humor is situational, the pacing agreeable, the whole affair concluded before it can offend anyone. For viewers seeking confirmation that some films simply wish to be pleasant, this one qualifies. It is a vintage of modest ambition, best served cold and not discussed at length afterward.

Thematic tags: none apply. This is an original French production with no awards, no franchise lineage, no source novel, no historical basis, no capes, and no domestic box office crown. It is, in the most literal sense, just a movie about a woman who wants to get married twice on purpose.