The fetching comedy "Priceless" ("Hors de Prix") weighs about as much as its star, Audrey Tautou, but like Tautou's pleasingly craven heroine it knows exactly what it's doing. Tautou plays a gold digger working her way through a series of sugar daddies in a series of swank hotels in a series of resort towns including Biarritz, Nice and Monte Carlo. Tautou's co-star is Gad Elmaleh, who plays Jean, a bartender and dog walker mistaken by Tautou's character, Irene, for a swell.
Born in Morocco, Elmaleh has a marvelous hangdog face and eyes on loan from Buster Keaton. In France he is nearly as well-known as Tautou, who by now can be deemed the official French national gamine.
At one point, the point at which you know for certain "Priceless" will deliver the goods, Tautou and Elmaleh stand side by side in a tiny hotel elevator, a little worse for the wear drink-wise. Director and co-writer Pierre Salvadori ("Apre Vous") keeps the camera on the elevator doors as they open, revealing the tipsy about-to-be-lovers. The doors close. Then they open again and the listing occupants, trying as hard as possible not to look crocked, zigzag their way across the floor. It's just a few seconds of screen time, but they're handled just right. The film glides along, looking fabulous, setting up its next little bit of business. (The cinematography by Gilles Henry makes the croissants look as mouth-watering as the beaches.)
Consciously evoking Ernst Lubitsch's "Trouble in Paradise," a Preston Sturges film or two and, most of all, "Breakfast at Tiffany's," "Priceless" is a fairy tale about a woman who discovers there's more to life than shoes (a little, anyway). Irene and Jean spend a night together, and then, much later, another night. She learns he's a mere resort employee, then practically dares him to stick with her while she shops him out of solvency. (He's flat broke within two days.) Jean falls in with a wealthy older widow played by Marie-Christine Adam, becoming a kept man and not minding it much. The arrangement equalizes Irene and Jean: They're both a couple of amiable prostitutes who save their hearts for each other.
The thing about a certain grade of contemporary French comedy, of which "Priceless" is a fine example, is the quality of the playing style. Nobody forces the situations, even the broadest ones. "Priceless" would no doubt suffer the usual crassification if Hollywood ever remade it in English. The film may be a contraption, but it is acted with simplicity and charm.
