Priceless

In the French Riviera, a comely gold digger (Audrey Tautou) mistakes a shy but handsome hotel bartender (Gad Elmaleh) for a millionaire, then trains him to be a gigolo, then competes with him, then discovers she loves him. Director Pierre Salvadori, writing with Benoît Graffin, concocts a sly, slick comment on the anxieties of sex and status, not to mention the true perils of the service industry (namely, the whoring). The leads pair well—Tautou, always either dressed to the nines or not dressed at all, is of course her gamine, saucer-eyed self, and Elmaleh shows a natural, classic-seeming gift for understated farce. But don’t let its natural effervescence distract from this movie’s main idea; in Salvadori and Graffin’s acidly romantic view, sometimes financial bankruptcy is the only thing that can properly mitigate moral bankruptcy.