Populaire (2012)

Populaire arrives from 2012 carrying the pleasant scent of a film with no interest in arguing with anybody. Régis Roinsard settles into 1958 and follows Rose Pamphyle, a provincial secretary who flees her father's marriage plans for a job with insurance agent Louis Échard, then discovers she can type at a speed bordering on the supernatural. He enters her in the regional speed typing championship. She loses. He trains her with colour-coded keys, piano lessons and posture drills. She wins. The costumes are sharp, the pink Japy typewriter is a triumph of production design, and the whole affair glides on the charm of Déborah François and Romain Duris.

There is a whisper of feminine ambition in all this. Rose defies her father, leaves the village, and finishes the film as the fastest typist in the world. That is not nothing. It is also a story in which a man selects her, trains her, deceives her for her own good, and watches her final triumph arrive moments after he has kissed her. Her independence holds for perhaps twenty minutes of screen time before it folds into a conventional romance with a conventionally withholding male lead. The rest of the cultural ledger sits empty. The cast is uniformly white and the romance is straight. The world of insurance offices, corporate sponsorship and celebrity endorsement drifts past without a single curious glance at the money underneath it. No character is given a body or a disposition that complicates the catalogue of pretty young women and stern older men.

The result is a frock, a score, and two attractive people learning to type. It wants to be Amélie and settles for being agreeable on a wet Sunday. Nothing here lectures, agitates, or asks anyone to reconsider the world it depicts. On any measure of contemporary social consciousness, this is a quiet film, and it seems content to remain so. The classification is straightforward: harmless, well-pressed, and unbothered.