Film, dir. Patrice Leconte, 2006
I love a good romantic movie ('good' being the operative word), but my heart really belongs to films about friendship. Especially, films that remind us how important friendship can be. My Best Friend works in that general vein. It involves a crotchety antiques dealer, Francois, who has, literally, no friends. He bets a priceless Greek vase to a colleague that he can't produce his best friend in 10 days. Indeed, he can't. So realizing that he's in deep doo-doo, he enlists a cheerful, sociable cabbie to help him learn the ways of friendship. As you might expect, hilarity and a bit of poignancy ensue. And it's in French, which really helps too. Francios has a daughter, and has a woman that he's in some kind of undefined sexual relationship with, but he can't commit fully to either of them until he learns how to make a friend. Even though this film really has nothing to do with sexuality, the idea that platonic love matters, and also that you can lead a potentially full life without sex, endears it to this A-teamer.
Walking out of the theater, all I could really say was "hmm, that was adorable." But that about captures it.
1 comment:
I fully agree. I really liked 'Mon meilleur ami', it is both innocent and poignant; and it also offers representations of happy people living single and coupled people living miserably. If you think about it, the caddy is single, but he's not upset abut it. His anxieties are not because his single, but because he has never managed to enter 'Who wants to be a billionaire' (which by the way it hilariously realistic, as they hired the actual host of the French show for the movie). On the other hand, the protagonist is in a sexual partnership he doesn't appears to struggle with or maintain, and yet he does not not 'the secret of friendship', that 'how did you find each other' most single people ask to couples. It is a very interesting subversion on the importance that is given to romance over friendship. Adorable. Yes.
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