The Valet (2006)

Francis Veber's The Valet arrives from 2006, a year when a French farce could still be assembled from clockwork and nerve. François Pignon, a parking valet of modest means and immodest romantic ambition, is recruited to pose as the lover of a supermodel so that her billionaire paramour might survive a conversation with his wife. The machinery is impeccable. Veber has been building these contraptions for decades, and the gears mesh with the quiet satisfaction of a well-oiled lock. Daniel Auteuil's Pierre Levasseur is a study in vanity wearing a suit, and the film's satire lands squarely on greed, lust, and the specific indignity of a man who cannot afford to divorce. Molière would recognize the blueprint and probably ask for a percentage.

The film does not trouble itself with the cultural preoccupations of a later decade. The cast is French, the concerns are marital, and the moral universe is resolutely bourgeois. A wealthy cad is humiliated, a decent man is rewarded, and the social order is restored without a single structural critique attached. There is a brief cross-dressing prostitute at the close, deployed as a punchline and nothing more. Beauty standards go unexamined. The bookstore owner's debt is solved by a cash transfer, which is the least revolutionary resolution available to a screenwriter. Elena, the model, has agency and a clean exit, but the film has no interest in making a case about it.

This is craftsmanship without an agenda, a comedy that trusts its own timing and asks nothing of the audience beyond attention. The result is pleasant, tightly wound, and entirely of its era. It is a film that wants to make you laugh and then leave, and it succeeds at both with an efficiency that borders on the rude.