Junior (2014)

There is a moment, roughly a third of the way through this 2014 French comedy, when the machinery of the plot becomes entirely visible and no one involved seems bothered by it. Alex has loved Sandra since childhood. He cannot speak to her. He enlists Antoine, a morose writer of some vanished romantic reputation, to coach him through the seduction. That is the film. Two men, one woman, a scheme. The title was changed to Junior for English-language markets, though the original Fiston has a certain defeated charm the replacement lacks.

What we have here is a comedy of gentle incompetence, the kind the French produce the way other nations produce procedural television. Franck Dubosc plays the weary mentor with the precision of a man who has done this before and will do it again. Kev Adams flails attractively. Nora Arnezeder exists primarily as the object of a plan, which the screenplay regards as a compliment. The jokes are about awkwardness, class embarrassment, and the indignity of wanting someone. None of it aspires to instruct us on how to live.

The film engages with no social questions of any kind. Race, gender politics, sexuality, the environment, the distribution of wealth, the body, the mind, the historical record: all absent, not through cowardice but through a total lack of interest in the categories. It is a story about a nervous young man and a sad older one, told with modest craft and no agenda whatsoever. The result is neither offensive nor edifying. It simply is, occupying its ninety minutes with the quiet confidence of a film that knows exactly how little it intends to say, and says it anyway. There is something almost restful in that.