The Women on the 6th Floor (Les femmes du 6ème étage) – Movie Review

By Ron Wilkinson Oct 20, 2011, 13:50 GMT

In 1960s Paris, a conservative couple\'s lives are turned upside down by two Spanish maids. ...more

A marvelously entertaining romantic comedy with a heartfelt political message packaged in 1960’s Paris.

Writer/director Philippe Le Guay (co-written with Jerome Tonnnerre) chose to set this funny and heartwarming polemic in the 1960’s, probably for the same reason that François Ozon set his “Potiche” in the same period. It was an uproarious time. It was a time, for better or for worse, in which everybody had an opinion and said their mind. Usually all at once and, more than once, with violence.

Jean-Louis Joubert (Fabrice Luchini) is a successful, third generation Parisian stockbroker. In a city not known for skills in making a buck, Jean-Louis has managed to amass a fortune. More to the point, he has managed to do so with style and without selling his soul.

Jean-Louis is married to Suzanne (Sandrine Kiberlain), a card-carrying member of the lunching female bourgeoisie. Actually, her friends are even more interesting than the sensuous and relatively vulnerable Suzanne. They are downright catty when it comes to the working class.

These are the fully redeveloped clones of that part of the hyper-smug, hyper-rich gene pool that made it through the French Revolution. These are Perrier drinkers who refuse to die. The backbones of the tennis clubs of today.

With the two adolescent sons shuffled away to boarding school the household is settling into a permanent miasma of upper class stasis. That is, until Maria (Natalia Verbeke) sets foot across the threshold. Maria is the new maid. She comes to replace the old Breton maid who raised the pair’s two sons, only to be driven from the household by the maddening fetishes of Jean-Louis and the frustrated rants of the increasingly isolated and unsatisfied Suzanne.

Maria moves into the maids’ quarters on the 6th floor and that’s when the trouble starts. Through a series of revealing and engaging surprises, Jean-Louis comes to understand the world of the women on the sixth floor.

The women are Spanish, driven from Spain by the terror of the Franco regime and the resulting economic disaster of the nation. They bring with them heartbreaking tales of cruelty, poverty and injustice.

As the film progresses Jean learns, along with the audience, that we all own a part of the misery of the Spanish exiles. They paid for our vacations and our housekeeping with the lives of their loved ones, while we flourished.

In spite of this tragic milieu, Jean-Louis eventually learns that the true love and redemption for which he has been longing is only a staircase away. As Jean-Louis realizes how little it takes him to make life immeasurably better for the maids on the sixth floor, the women show him the side of life tragically denied by the responsibilities of his upper class birth.

The question is whether Jean is cable of breaking the golden bonds of privilege and confronting his basic human needs.

Philippe Le Guay and Fabrice Luchini collaborated on two films before this, and they are a pair to be reckoned with. In "L'année Juliette" (1995) and  "Le coût de la vie" (2003) Luchini breaks the rules of romantic and civil fidelity and pays the price, in a lighthearted way. These are not films about Faustian bargains, but rather parables in which the hero is dunked in a barrel of his own silliness.

The trick is to breathe sincerity and heat-felt gladness, with a touch of bittersweet sacrifice, into these all too richly filmed romps into French sensuality. Le Guay succeeds better than ever before in this easygoing success story of a man who finds that the price of love is high, but worth every step.

Lush photography by cinematographer Jean-Claude Larrieu takes us inside those sumptuous old townhouses. Excellent supporting performances by long time Pedro Almodovar collaborators Carmen Maura as maid Conception Ramirez and Lola Dueñas as tough as nails revolutionary Carmen.

Super supporting work by lovely Sandrine Kiberlain and silky smooth Natalia Verbeke. This may be Fabrice Luchini’s best performance. It is as if the screenplay was written just for him.

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Directed by: Philippe Le Guay
Written by: Philippe Le Guay, Jérôme Tonnerre
Starring: Fabrice Luchini, Sandrine Kiberlain and Natalia Verbeke
Release Date: October 7, 2011
MPAA: Unrated
Running Time: 104 Minutes
Country: France
Language: French and Spanish
Color: Color