Neuilly Yo Mama! (2009)

The premise arrives with the tidy confidence of a fable: a fourteen-year-old beur named Sami is lifted from the projects of Chalon-sur-Saône and set down among the manicured hedges of Neuilly-sur-Seine, where his aunt Djamila has married into the de Chazelle family and their two unsettlingly blond children. The film understands exactly what it is doing. It places a Maghrebi teenager at the center of a mainstream French comedy and surrounds him with a supporting cast that is notably not white, then mines the collision for laughs. A pork gag lands on the haraam diet. A class election becomes a proxy war. The outsider is mocked, absorbs the mockery, and wins the girl. The machinery is visible and it hums along without apology.

The social consciousness on display is real but narrow. Race and class are the entire engine, and the film keeps its eye on the gulf between the banlieue and the sixteenth arrondissement, though it treats that gulf as material for farce instead of argument. Nobody is lectured. The wealthy are ridiculous, the poor are resourceful, and the whole arrangement resolves in a schoolyard vote and a violinist's forgiveness. There is a faint current of gender friction in Marie's refusal to tolerate violent boys, and in Djamila's authority over the household, but the film has no framework for it and does not want one. Political jokes flicker past, as Libération noted, without settling into a message.

What remains is a competent, agreeable comedy of manners that knows its audience and flatters them gently. It is not preachy. It is not angry. It is a 2009 French crowd-pleaser that happened to cast its minority lead with genuine charisma and let the culture clash do the heavy lifting. A sommelier would call it quaffable. It will not be remembered, as one critic observed, but it goes down without complaint.