tag it! Written by Boyd van Hoeij French director Patrice Leconte takes things easy in his latest film or How to Gain a Friend in Ten Days. Predictable from start to finish, this is the type of dramatic comedy that often gets labelled as pleasant, which means that it is not laugh-out-loud funny and inoffensively hobbles along to an ending that could have been spotted miles away.
With Daniel Auteuil as the successful art dealer who is clueless about friendships and friends, this item could find some success offshore as a French comedy with a big name director and star in much the same way as Francis Veber s , which also starred Auteuil and co-starred Dany Boon, who is Auteuil s foil here. Patrice Leconte s previous film was the long-awaited threequel , and in it is again all about friends, though for the latter film the absence of friendship might be a better description. The best friend of the title is in fact what Auteuil s character Fran ois is desperately looking for after a bet with Catherine (Julie Gayet), his partner in an antiques business, challenging him to present her with his best friend in ten days or forfeit an expensive red-figure vase some 2,500 years old.
Rather than plainly telling her he does not have any real friends let alone a best friend, Fran ois puts himself through all kinds of embarrassing situations to first ascertain he does not really have any friends and then goes a desperate manhunt for the ideal best friend or, at least, a good enough best friend for Fran ois to get to keep the vase. The set-up is vintage farce material, and this is where the problem lies: Leconte, whose previous films such as L homme du train (The Man on the Train) and where interesting character studies with undercurrents of comedy, here tries to do the opposite but has trouble developing his characters as human beings because of a plot that is solely interested in comedy, comeuppance and clich s. Compared to the characters in the all-out comedy tag it!
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