Title: The Women on the 6th Floor

Opens: October 7, 2011

Folks in the U.S. Tea Party might be horrified to note-if they can catch subtle clues-that the writer-director has communist or at least socialist tendencies, and that his leftist views come to fruition in the story. This is not to say that “The Women on the 6th Floor” is principally political, which it is only in the broad sense. Instead, Philippe Le Guay’s interest is in amusing his audience while painlessly giving us a comedy of manners that may not be as witty as anything by Oscar Wilde but does alert us that people whose dinnerware is made in Xian, China have lives quite often more interesting than those who feast and drink on Wedgewood china. A plethora of studies have shown that happiness does not increase exponentially with wealth: that once people earn enough to live with basic comfort may be more excited by life than others born with silver spoons in their mouths.

In “The Women on the 6th Floor,” Jean-Louis Joubert (Fabrice Luchini) finds himself in the latter socio-economic group, having inherited ownership of an investment bank in Paris. He doesn’t know that he’s unhappy until he compares his life to those of the contingent of Spanish-born maids crammed together on the sixth floor of an old building in a posh Paris neighborhood, while he makes his bed some floors below in a richly-furnished set of rooms. He is married to Suzanne Joubert (Sandrine Kiberlain), who like her husband ultimately realizes that the servants upstairs have more joie de vivre than both she and her contingent of Ladies Who Lunch.

Le Guay’s film is a frothy entertainment, nothing much that smacks of “art,” but is rather one which can appeal to a variety of audiences that can relate to French movies that are not endless talk-fests. Situated in Paris in 1960, when Franco remains in power in Spain and De Gaulle is the big fromage in France, “The Women” finds Jean-Louis frustrated that his maid is unable to make a breakfast egg for exactly three and one-half minutes. Out she goes, and in comes the attractive María Gonzales (Argentine-born Natalia Verbeke), who on her first day enlists the cheerful help of her floor-mates-who include Pedro Almadóvar favorite Carmen Maura as Concepción Ramirez. In a matter of hours the dishes are washed, the furniture dusted, the shirts cleaned and ironed, all followed up the next morning by a perfect egg. Forget the bourgeois complaint “You can’t get good help nowadays.”

Turned off by investment clients who are rich and act as if they own their stockbrokers, bored with the parties that his wife drags him to, Jean-Louis discovers in middle age that he had missed out on the true camaraderie enjoyed by the giggling servants. He gets to work helping them in many ways-counseling a victim of beatings, driving them to a picnic, even sitting on a pew in a Spanish-language church-while at the same time he is falling in love with the efficient, charming but vulnerable María. He even becomes jealous when a boorish caterer appears to be making time in the kitchen with María, threatening to fire her for indiscretions that are in no way her fault.

Though difficult to say that the rotund and lovable Jean-Louis could evoke the romantic attentions of a woman a quarter century his junior, we’ll just have to suspend disbelief and go with the airy tone of a film that does not cross color lines as did Tate Taylor’s superior “The Help” but does competently traverse barriers of class and nation.

Unrated. 104 minutes. (c) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

Overall – B