Life

Amour the merrier

Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou team up for the third `Xavier & Martine' film by Cedric Klapisch - a fantastic rom-com with some actual comedy, writes Brian Campbell

IN CHINESE Puzzle, our hero Xavier (Romain Duris - The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Heartbreaker, Populaire) lets us know that his life, particularly his love life, is complicated.

Over the course of the film, his British wife Wendy (Kelly Reilly) walks out on him, he makes it possible for his lesbian friend Isabelle (Cecile De France) to have a child with her partner and then ends up marrying a Chinese-American so he can become a US citizen.

And all this is before his ex, Martine (Audrey Tautou), shows up.

This is the third Cedric Klapisch film based around Xavier and Martine, following Pot Luck (2002) and Russian Dolls (2005) - but there's no real need to have taken in those two flicks to enjoy this rollicking tale.

Romantic comedies with actual comedy are rather rare but there are many laugh-out-loud moments in Chinese Puzzle.

In one key scene towards the end when a host of characters are racing to the one place at the same time, the excruciatingly tense comic value recalls Fawlty Towers.

Duris is fantastic and after teaming up to great effect with Vanessa Paradis in Heartbreaker, he and Tautou are a nifty double act here. (They will be on the big screen together again soon in Michel Gondry's film Mood Indigo).

Director Klapisch has shot a stunning-looking film, with some eye-catching New York sequences and a host of neat visual flourishes (including some innovative uses of Google Streetview).

Xavier is an author and after Wendy flees with their two kids to the US to be with her new flame, her now ex follows suit.

Xavier shacks up with Isabelle and her partner Ju (Sandrine Holt), before getting his own apartment in Chinatown, getting a cash-in-hand courier job and employing a dodgy lawyer. The lawyer advises him to marry an American and it is the subsequent union with a Chinese-American friend that is the source of much of the comedy.

Martine (Tautou) doesn't really come into the action until an hour or so but before you know it she and her two kids have flown to New York from France and it's clear that she has her eyes on the newly single (but newly married) Xavier. Xavier explains via voiceover that most people go from point 'A' to point 'B' in their lives but he has been having problems getting to 'B'.

But perhaps this is why he's a successful author. As his editor tells him, "happiness is a disaster for fiction".

There are more laughs to be had when Xavier seeks advice from long-dead philosophers and when Martine - Wayne's World-style - starts talking fluent Chinese without warning.

Cecile De France and Kelly Reilly are excellent in their supporting roles, as are all the child actors in the film.

Chinese Puzzle is, as they'd say in France, genial.

* Chinese Puzzle opens at QFT Belfast today and runs until Thursday July 10 (QueensFilmTheatre.com).