Avenue Montaigne

Directed by Danièle Thompson

Call it the Robert Altman aesthetic: A large cast of diverse performers come together within the confines of a single, unifying location; their characters possess varying degrees of education in accordance with their age and class, and universal emotional turmoil unites their fraught experiences. It’s a daring proposition, but it can work beautifully (Altman’s Short Cuts) and disastrously (Paul Haggis’ Crash). The technique falls to the middle of this spectrum in Avenue Montaigne, a light movie with heavy intentions.

French writer/director Danièle Thompson (Jetlag) starts off on a terrible note, presenting her story as a lame showbiz comedy that hardly aims for ingenuity. Jessica (Cécile de France) works at a classy bohemian joint called Bar De Theatres, adjacent to the venue where numerous high profile artisans display their craft. These include soap star Catherine (Valérie Lemercier) and classical pianist Jean-François (Albert Dupontel). In a nearby universe, there’s art collector Jacques (Claude Brasseur) and his wistful grown son Fred (Christopher Thompson). American audience members like myself won’t recognize these performers, although they’re all quite competent at filing each slot in this round-up of the usual rom-com suspects. But English ends up in the script—awkwardly—with the addition of an American director (Sydney Pollock, very tongue-in-cheek) who sets his sights on casting Catherine for a developing Sartre adaptation.

At first it seem like Thompson’s storylines have no clear direction, but Avenue Montaigne eventually gets past cutesy insider name-dropping (Quoth the superstar: “Any news from Alan Resnais?”) and settles into some fairly compelling drama. The adventures of Jessica as she traipses through a world of wealth and snobbery do carry a certain charm, particularly because she has no grand standards when it comes to money and prestige. She’s an innocent surrounded by chaos, and all she sees is beauty. In one inspired scene, the spunky blonde climbs to the top of a high-rise and admires a sweeping view of the Eiffel Tower, the sheer urbanity of it all putting her in a daze. It’s a nice moment, sappiness and all.

Since Jessica is a sweet creation, she doesn’t need witty one-liners to have credible pathos. The other people occupying the crowded space of Avenue Montaigne need to seem lively, and Thompson unfortunately tries to compensate for their one-dimensional qualities by filling time with vapid comedic material that (mostly) disappoints. These characters come across as incessantly annoying. That’s probably intentional, but it’s pretty tedious to sit through extraneous scenes featuring rich, successful folk bitching about how jaded they’ve become. By the end of the movie, we can relate.