Starring: Audrey Tautou, Guillaume Canet, Laurent Stocker, Francoise Bertin
Director: Claude Berri
Category: IIB (French)
Ensemble, C'est Tout might be set in Paris and feature Audrey Tautou as its star, but a quirky romance it is not. Based on Anna Gavalda's novel about three young Parisians' struggle with their hand-to-mouth existence, Claude Berri's film offers drama pleasantly devoid of the starry-eyed whimsy of Gallic celluloid exports like Orchestral Seats or Amelie, Tautou's breakthrough-cum-albatross.
While very much a film that could finally liberate Tautou (above with Canet) from being typecast as the meek ingenue - she plays Camille, a belligerent, chain-smoking artist who lives in an unheated attic and works night shifts cleaning offices - it's also a break for Berri, whose last film, One Leaves, The Other Stays, from 2005, is a comedy about amorous exploits of two well-off, middle-class men.
Ensemble even begins as if it's social-realist fare, with Camille finishing her medical check-up in a mobile clinic as part of the process for confirming her job with Touclean ('all clean' in French), and featuring a funny exchange between the woman and the doctor about her job, with Camille describing herself as a 'surface engineer'. The action switches to the pastoral pad of the ailing Paulette (Francoise Bertin), before zipping back to a Parisian kitchen where her grandson Franck (Guillaume Canet) is frantically at work, and nearly missed Paulette's phone call telling her she's in hospital.