While not quite as reconstructive as
En liberté!, Pierre Salvadori inhabits one critical element of the Hollywood screwball comedy more faithfully in
Hors de prix by plucking two typical supporting, even cameo, roles and forcing them into leads of the picture. Each embodies so perfectly a one-note personality that I can’t think of any actual 30s/40s screwballs with side-characters-as-leads that are so dull! Of course this all changes as we get to know them but Gad Elmaleh’s dim fool is a stand-in for Keaton's deadpan mannerisms, while Audrey Tautou follows the manipulative financial leech to a T, until they are presented with mirrors that allow each to build into fleshed out people, who couple up against all rules of the game. This creates the inverse of the expected rippling effect, so instead of spreading into the milieu with chaos, the wrong ingredients implode to infect themselves. Contrary to
En liberté! these characters don’t seamlessly reside in the world of screwball but rather the opposite, with the film inserting its strange decision of manipulating uncredited roles into a normal world, to hysterical results. The content is more in line with the sex comedies of the 60s but the pairing and interplay is that of the earlier movement. The dry wit humor is perfect because Gad Elmaleh is synonymous in his blank disposition as the ‘normal’ folks we encounter, because they’re one in the same with him just plucked from the pile, a fish out of water. This is a comedic melting pot though, with sight gags, satire, and comedy of manners all taking a turn. My favorite running gag were subtle but hilarious in series,
the recurring jokes that Gad Elmaleh cannot stop acting on his impulse to fit the role of a server, with his typical characterization so deeply rooted that they're blended into his identity, jumping at any and all triggers that would initiate that function, which are many! Even he knows he doesn’t belong in this movie.
I love Tautou’s declaration, “you have a soul” with each party only half-believing this, still playing catch-up with their new experience of playing first fiddle in a movie, not just life.
The other well-constructed idea is that as Elmaleh begins to exhibit Tautou’s repetitive behavioral cons, he finds in himself a spark that would lead to authentic self-actualization in a movie acting as reality, but here fully embraces living a lie as the pathway to happiness, allowing him to blend with Tautou and grow closer honestly, in the ultimate ironic play. It’s a weird inverse of how these films typically operate since both characters are on vacation from their identities, him through social climbing and her through actually emoting. In breaking from their unidimensional stereotypes acting roles, each finds growth; similar to how two romantic leads end in the same place but through authentic change masking its artificiality. This is a movie, it knows what it is, and in some ways the path it takes is more authentic by not faking the audience from their experience!
Even the finale is set up to achieve happiness through their characters’ default ways (his as servant to her, her as scheming for money over love) and yet the responsibilities of being a lead give way to Big Change and propel the union a romantic comedy simply must have, at the very last moment, much to her chagrin - just look at her facial expression and body language squirming as she has this realization, it’s not relief!
