Danièle Thompson‘s Avenue Montaigne (released in France as Fauteuils d’Orchestre, or Orchestra Seats) is a charming, slightly sugary movie. Thompson got her start writing screenplays, most famously a shared credit for the excellent, disturbing history film La Reine Margot, perhaps the truest look ever at the troubled French monarchy. In the last several years, she has been directing her own comic screenplays, beginning with La Bûche in 1999, with the same incisive approach to character established through dialogue. For Avenue Montaigne, she worked with her son, Christopher Thompson, on the screenplay, and he plays the lead romantic role in the movie as well.
The various plot strands are brought together around a young drifter from the provinces, Jessica, played by the impossibly cute Cécile de France. Following the lead of her beloved grandmother (Suzanne Flon, who died in post-production and to whom the film is dedicated), she moves to Paris and lies and scraps her way into a job at the café across the street from the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Slowly, the irresistible Jessica crosses paths with a concert pianist, Jean-François Lefort (Albert Dupontel), playing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées; Claudie (Dani), the whiskey-voiced gardienne of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées; Catherine Versen (Valérie Lemercier), an actress starring in a Feydeau play at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées next door; and a wealthy art collector, Jacques Grumberg (Claude Brasseur), putting up his art for auction at the Hotel des Ventes Drouot-Montaigne, also next door. It’s an ingenious way to embed a story in a quartier particulier, even though one character remarks in the film about this neighborhood, quite correctly, “c’est pas un quartier.” That area of Paris is a collection of buildings, some of which have people in them, but the combination of luxury hotels and a lack of places to eat and buy normal things like groceries makes it inhospitable.
Of course, it is now impossible to make a whimsical movie in Paris without setting oneself up for comparison with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001). This is unfair, since Jacques Demy was making whimsical movies, just not really about Paris, long before Amélie. Jeunet’s film was goofy in a way that Fauteuils is not, although it is definitely a long way from that depressing realism sometimes associated with French cinema. Some parts of the plot are over the top and do not ring true, but a little fantasy never hurts, especially in this droll story, so smart in its intellectual leanings. The biggest laugh was related to American director Brian Sobinski (played by Sidney Pollack, in a funny mixture of French and English), who is casting a new biopic on Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. At one point, with no textual reference to give away the joke, there is a cutaway to a waiting room with five actors lined up against the wall in chairs, all ringers for Jean-Paul Sartre, with pipes and glasses.
