Priceless (2006)

Priceless arrives from 2006, a French romantic farce in which Audrey Tautou plays Irène, a professional companion who trades her evenings for suites in Biarritz, and Gad Elmaleh plays Jean, the hotel bartender she mistakes for a millionaire. Pierre Salvadori has acknowledged Breakfast at Tiffany's as his model, and the debt shows in the film's breezy indifference to its own moral accounting. Nobody is punished. Nobody learns a lesson about the dignity of labor. The rich are not overthrown, they are simply billed, repeatedly, and the bill is passed along to whoever is standing nearest the bar.

The picture is amoral in a way that now reads as almost archaeological. It observes wealth with the flat curiosity of a nature documentary and declines to editorialize. Jean is mentored into gigolo work, negotiates a thirty thousand euro watch, and the camera regards this as a punchline, not a crisis of conscience. There are no speeches. There is no reckoning. Class exists here as decor, like the marble in the lobby, and the film's interest in it is purely aesthetic. A search of the runtime for a thesis about equity, identity, the planet, the body, or the mind turns up a scooter, a sarong, and a single euro coin spent on a toll.

Critics at the time called it fluff, and fluff it is, though fluff assembled with some precision. The performances are sharp, the locations are expensive, and the whole enterprise radiates a pre-crisis European confidence about money that no studio would bankroll today. Judged against the current cultural ledger, the film scores nothing at all, not from malice but from total disinterest. It is a farce about people who want things. That is the entire project, and there is something oddly restful in watching a movie with no ambition beyond being charming while being slightly bad.