Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Logan Dodd There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.

MartinHafer This is a good film but because there are some plot holes it cannot rise much above this. It is the story of a middle aged (and rather DULL) man who has recently become single, as his wife left him for another. He's a busy man so he decides to get a part-time housekeeper to tidy up his little apartment. All seemingly goes pretty well until after a few weeks, the much younger housekeeper tells him she is now without a place to live and asks if she can temporarily stay with him. At first he says no, but quickly agrees.So far, so good. Here is where the first problem with the plot occurs. Although they both tend to live rather separate parallel lives in the apartment, inexplicably they start a sexual relationship that seems to come out of nowhere. Apart from feeling grateful he let her stay, it is hard to understand the motivation she had for sleeping with him--he doesn't give very much of himself to her emotionally. For his part, he just seems to be using her for sex in the beginning. Over time, he begins to SLOWLY give himself over to her emotionally but he always seems to be holding back too much. Her intense love of him at this point is just too unbelievable. However, eventually, her love cools and by the end of the picture she's with another (whose mother then makes overtures to our male lead--thinking he's the housekeeper's father). This part actually rang much more true than the original love affair, as I just couldn't see what kept them together at all (despite excellent acting).

donofrio08 The best thing coming from this Berri film is that plausibility and prediction conspire to improve a weak plot. The spectator, however, gets the surprise of his life when, in a sudden twist, the film reveals he has been watching the wrong movie. Give the kudos to the actors: sexily believable and deceitfully ordinary. Jacques and Laura, the main characters in this autumn-spring old line plot, early show their true self. She, young and beautiful, knows he is in a middle of a sentimental crisis. He, mature and confused, is never deceived by her egotist intentions. A sexual relationship is sure to occur, and so it does. But, it comes as a strange mix of feelings and desires, that the film never gets it clear. That's the relevance of this story: life cannot be deconstructed and explained in terms of art. Just the mirror, as the good Stendhal knew almost two centuries ago. Une femme de menage (more explicative than the English title) is a quiet thought on the passing of chances and the options we make; and a lecture on the futility of adapting our expectations to a self-deceitful sense of self-importance.

noralee "Housekeeper (Une femme de ménage)" is a wry commentary on mid-life relationships that teeters on being male fantasy wish fulfillment. Writer/director Claude Berri uses visual and musical metaphors to show differences between characters, building on the central character's work as a sound engineer recording classical music and jazz. Jean-Pierre Bacri recalls the mid-life crisis role he wrote for himself in "The Taste of Others." We are very slowly introduced to his stuck in the mud life and the cause for it, and then slowly see him come back to life to deal with his feelings. Amusing touch that the titular nubile nymphet eschews modern conveniences in cleaning while listening to pounding hip-hop dance music. Her taste in music and manipulative need for a rent-free apartment is about all that's realistic about her. Would a Hollywood version let everybody finally act their ages?

Chris Knipp Claude Berri's Une Femme de Ménage (Housekeeper) takes us to a familiar world of contemporary French cinema: a casual, chic quartier of Paris where a successful fifty-something jazz record producer named Jacques (Jean-Pierre Bacri) lives in a very comfortable flat that's a very big mess because his wife has left him. He answers a notice tacked up on a neighborhood café and before long Laura (Émilie Dequenne), a twenty-something with a perfect, ripe body and cooperative good nature equally in evidence, is not only coming twice a week to clean and iron, but, because her boyfriend kicks her out, has moved in. Next thing you know she's offering that body to Jacques and when his estranged wife Constance (played in a tortured cameo by director Catherine Breillat) appears at the door and begs for a reconciliation, he decides to escape on a two-week vacation in Brittany at his artist-chicken farmer friend Ralph's place, and Laura begs to be taken along.There is something charming about this moment when Jacques and Laura head for the seacoast, Laura packing the vacuum cleaner (`respirateur' in French) to practice (she's been using a broom, so she can enjoy hip-hop on the boom box; he's told her she must master the `respirateur' if she's going to get more work) - and insisting on getting herself a haircut and dye job enroute. She's very much a work in progress, and the uncertainty of her relationship with Jacques is interesting. It's so absurd you half believe it might work.Laura is eager to please and so docile and loving, poor Jacques would have a new mate for sure if he didn't mind one twenty-five or thirty years younger whose taste runs to loud pop, junky TV, and trashy magazines. The dialogue in the car defines the uncertainty. He doesn't love her -- he'd be a fool to - but he likes having her around.Ralph (Jacques Frantz) provides a whimsically eccentric note - he paints portraits of his pet chickens and then serves them for dinner; the house smells like a barnyard. But it also turns out, when Laura snoops in Ralph's bedroom and finds a ring with Jacques' name on it, that Constance has been there recently in her wanderings and has slept with Ralph.The beach is what separates Jacques and Laura. She loves the water; he hates it. He covers up and reads while she plunges, and then she becomes a regular in volleyball games with two teams of well built young men. Late at night she insists that Jacques take her dancing. He meets an old woman friend there - also just abandoned by her mate. . . but this sounds more complicated than it is. What happens is that when Jacques says he's about to go back to Paris, where Laura, who can be anything she wants here, is only his housekeeper, Laura finds a young man, and is as ready to pair off with him as she was with Jacques.Jacques meets the young man's mom on the beach. She's getting divorced. He's sympathetic. He goes for a swim to keep mom company. He gets a cramp in the water. She helps him out. Maybe they'll become a couple. THE END.It's too bad this novel adaptation by the talented M. Berri trails off this way. There is real fun in the sense of possibility Laura's voluptuous appearance provides. In French movies, old, ugly men are deemed attractive: note that Laura's cute new boyfriend doesn't even have a speaking part. He's just a walk-on - or rather a run-off: he lopes down to the ocean with Laura and that's the last we see of him. This alone makes Housekeeper a fresh vision for American viewers.However, there's hardly anything profound here, despite the French point of view, nor can Laura, whose nice body and youth are her chief coping skills, be seen as a liberated woman in the mold of Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim. Femme de Ménage is fun, but there's something hasty and condescending about it. An Eric Rohmer story probably wouldn't have the uneasy class aspects of Laura's inappropriateness for Jacques: age would the only factor (compare Claire's Knee). To see how hasty the story is, think of the sensitive and profound character study of a lonely man in Claude Sautet's 1992 Un Coeur en Hiver.