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Trailer for "The Valet"

It might be interesting to examine sometime why Americans haven’t generally excelled at refined farce. The failure—or uninterest—almost certainly has something or other to do with our national history and character. (Can we indict Puritanism again?)

It’s not true that we’ve never managed to bring off high-style work, particularly in the movies. Howard Hawk’s Bringing Up Baby (1938) is at the apex of achievement in 1930s screwball comedy (even if it tanked at the box office).

Still, there’s no denying the absence in our cultural heritage of a Georges Feydeau, an Oscar Wilde or a Noel Coward. Or even a Francis Veber, for that matter. Veber is really only a journeyman farceur in the French tradition. His film work (which includes the screenplay for La Cage aux folles) has rarely been acutely inspired, but it’s usually been workmanlike (farce does require attention to structural details) and funny. He more than rose to the occasion for The Dinner Game (1998), which had an elegantly amusing setup and execution.

His latest, The Valet, isn’t without its rewards, but they’re modest: It’s hardly Veber working at the top of his game. The basic mechanics of the genre do their job, but there’s a, well, somewhat mechanical quality to it.

The title’s valet is Francois Pignon (a name Veber has used in other films), a hotel parking lot employee in Paris. When we first encounter Francois (Gad Elmaleh) in the film’s teasingly funny opening moments, he’s in a red Ferrari, playing a game of supercilious conspicuous consumption with another car jockey at a stoplight.

In short order we get Francois’ situation and the movie’s conceit: He’s in love with Emilie (Virginie Ledoyen), his childhood sweetheart, and preparing to propose. But she’s uninterested, and worried about her debt load as the owner of a newly opened bookstore. When the depressed and rebuffed Francois wanders down the street and into a tabloid photographer’s impromptu snap of a billionaire industrialist, Levasseur, and his mistress (Daniel Auteuil and Alice Taglione), he’s presented with a marvelous opportunity.

To prevent his wife from suing him for divorce, the industrialist pays Francois to cohabit with Elena, the girlfriend, for a month, to convince said spouse (Kristen Scott Thomas, who evidentally speaks fluent French) that he’s this supermodel’s boyfriend, and that hubby was only a random bystander in this photo op.

Veber, even more than usually, keeps the proceedings forging ahead relentlessly; the movie doesn’t lack for pace, even when nothing significant is happening . The thrust of all this action is toward a worm- and tables-turning denouement.

Francois is an appealing schmo, a rather sweet nonentity whose only ambition seems to be to wed Emilie. Elmaleh has some resemblance to a hybridization of Buster Keaton and the late actor-director John Cassavetes; at least that’s how he struck me. In action, he resembles neither one. His Francois never suggests what a smart cutie like Ledoyen’s Emilie could ever see in him, in grammar school or anytime later. He’s something of a sad sack.

The most animated and farcically appropriate performance is Auteuil’s rapacious baron of capital. (There’s a very light touch of class conflict and satire.)

Veber’s invention and spirit of the ridiculous were operating at a low force level when he worked on The Valet. Farce is more reliant on wit than comedy, but Veber settled into a sentimentally comedic path. Everybody is more or less sweet or harmlessly eccentric, except for the Lavasseurs.

The Valet is certainly pleasant, but that’s not the very highest praise for a sex farce or a comedy of manners. It’s more plaisant than pointu, more agreeably amusing than mordantly funny.