The good:Excellent actor performance concerning 3 of the 4 main actors. Aurelie Tautou was just good but not excellent. - The people in the story are kind of sympathetic.The bad:Everything else. First, when I watch a movie, I don't want to think about how the movie is done. About, is the acting is good. I just want to enter into the movie. Live the experience with the people I see. Or if you want to make a movie in order to think to something, just do a dreaming-like movie à la David Lynch.The realization of this movie is simply horrible. When you watch this movie, you think about the camera movement. Terrible as in bad TV french series with small budget. Actors: Main actor are very good. But for almost each second role, the acting is just plain bad. In the first 10 minutes of the movies, I noticed at least two actors (second role) that were very _bad_. I believe I am a very nice public. Even mid-good actor can make the trick with me. But, this time it was like: we play like if we were in a theater not in real life nor movie. May be this impression is only in VO (French).Concerning the story: I don't dislike slow movies in general. I love Japanese very long movies where nothing occurs for 1 minutes on the screen. But when this kind of thing occurs in slow movies, in general this is for a good reason. There is a "hidden" message or at least a stunning view. In this movie, there is nothing like that. The number of scene that could be trashed is simply enormous.But this one was just completely boring. There is no plot. This is not a joke. There really is no surprise in the entire movie. No "action", no changing "event". The most vivid moment of the entire movie is when Camille (Aurelie Tautou) drop a radio by a window because she is angry. The rest of the story, is something you can see every day.The message: "Socialize and you will live better". OK, I get it. I didn't need a complete movie with this only one message.In conclusion:If I was alone, I wouldn't have watched this movie until the end. Even if the character are attaching and the actors are excellent, this is just not enough to save this movie. There are so many realization errors that I was "pop out" of this movie too much.

Vaguely interesting movie about life, but I felt it was made fascinating only due to the charisma of its two leads, the wonderful Guillaume Canet and the irrepressible Audrey Tautou. Had the leads been given to any other actor with considerable less charm, the movie would have sank. The character's central conflict is not firmly established, and watching the plot develop was equivalent to swimming in an open sea: direction-less. The happy ending was completely expected but heartwarming all the same; I just wished they had brought out the narrative motive more convincingly for me to feel like there was a point to this whole movie. The pacing was also a little too slow, and the nondescript dialog emphasized the lengthy duration of the movie.On a whole, I felt the director could have done a lot better with the movie by giving it greater focus, faster pacing, wittier dialog- there were quite a few moments in the film between Tautou and Canet's characters that could have done better with wittier dialog.A must-watch only for the actors' fans.

It begins in a quite French comedy way. It's the cleaning girl who lives under the roof, the extremely nerdy young Parisian aristocrat and the young soft macho chef aspirant. They come together and it could have been both entertaining and thought inspiring.But it turns into feel-good in a manner which is worse than most Hollywood remakes. Audrey Tautou doesn't have that variation in her acting that you now can demand. Or does the take the wrong parts? Guillaume Canet as the young chef is better.But the story is too simple, looking at the big market in the West too much. You don't feel as good from this as was intended.

Claude Berri is a director who often seems on the verge of becoming a name outside France but somehow doesn't quite make it. His films are interesting - One Leaves, The Other Stays - to excellent - Lucie Aubrac with very little dross. Now he's taken a popular French novel and cast Audrey Tautou in a lead for which she's almost but not quite suited. She plays a gifted anorexic artist who has elected to work as a cleaner to her mother's disappointment. She becomes friendly with an eccentric aristocrat, Laurent Stocker, who lives in an immense apartment which he shares more or less unaccountably with a surly chef, Guillaume Canet. When he realizes that Camille (Tautou) is ill Philbert (Stocker) takes her to live in his apartment and nurses her back to health, this allows for the Benedict and Beatrice element between Tautou and womanizer Canet who also has an elderly grandmother in hospital. Against the odds the three form a bond and bring the grandmother into the menage when she leaves hospital and that's about it. Stocker, who generates all of the action tends to become low man on his own totem pole so that his own development as an actor who finds his own romance takes something of a back seat to Tautou and Canet. Never less than interesting it doesn't quite make it to the next level.