Technically, this flawed and excruciatingly uneven romantic comedy should not have worked. Its pace is lazy, its subject of finding love in the most unexpected of places is nothing new, and its male lead looks like a cross between Ron Perlman and Paul Giamatti. Thankfully, there is the always reliable French ingénue Audrey Tautou to save the day. Although her trademark quirky presence has been used to death (Amelie, Coco Before Chanel, He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not), there’s no faulting the girl for well, being herself, for she’s just so utterly endearing in her own skin.
This time round, she plays Nathalie, a hopeless romantic who believes she has found true love in Francois (Pio Marmai) whom she meets in a café during the film’s utterly cloying first 10 minutes (too many cutesy moments). But their perfect relationship is cut short by tragedy after a brief marriage. Francois is killed in a road accident and Nathalie spends the next 15 minutes mourning his death (too depressing). To cope, she buries herself in her work as a project manager for a Swedish firm. And that’s when the film finally finds its beat.
While daydreaming one day, she spontaneously kisses one of her subordinates, the ungainly Markus (Francois Damiens). Office rumors swirl and doubts are cast because Markus doesn’t fit the mold of a man Nathalie would date (the guy’s certainly no looker but has a generous sense of humor). And it is his gawkiness that carries the movie, and, along with Tautou’s doe-eyed sensibility, they come across as a modern day version of Beauty and the Beast, and it works. Their awkward moments together are genuinely cute and their slow-burning, unlikely romance is what holds the film together in the end.
Directors David and Stephane Foenkinos are generally good at establishing the film’s mise-en-scenes and are sensitive enough towards the film’s theme of the nature of true love, but the first half hour is simply directionless, relying on typical French aesthetics like a bouncy, melancholic soundtrack to move things along. Thankfully, Tautou handles the film’s emotive first half pretty well, but it’s only when she’s paired with the awkward Damiens that she truly comes alive. The Foenkinos are also smart to capitalize on Tautou’s inexplicable charm—the final shot of Tautou looking straight into the camera with the warmest of smiles, to mark that Nathalie’s heart has finally opened, is worth the ticket price alone.