What: Cinefranco, the Toronto French Film Festival
When: March 26 – April 3
Where: AMC Yonge & Dundas, right at Dundas subway station
Cost: Students – $8.50, Single Tickets – $10 and can be purchased in person or online. Arrive at least 30 minutes  early  to ensure tickets are available.

Cinefranco, one of the best small film festivals in Toronto, showcases French cinema from France, Canada, and other French-speaking countries that often won’t play in cinemas outside of France or Quebec. This year the festival has moved to the AMC Yonge & Dundas, a much better venue which provides comfortable seating, great screens, and stadium seating – you can still read the subtitles should someone tall choose to sit in front of you. Past years have showcased such gems as La Naissance des Pieuvres (2008), Ensemble C’est Tout (2008), and Peindre ou Faire L’Amour (2007). This year’s festival offers up a wide variety of films from comedy to drama.

Today’s schedule included a lovely laugh-out-loud comedy from France, Le Coach, about a life coach, Max (Richard Berry) who, in an effort to pay off his large gambling debts, takes on a job to coach a hopeless engineer, Patrick Jean-Paul Rouve), into becoming a good manager who can seal the deal with a difficult and important client. The engineer is a mess – from his bad clothes, to his total push-over attitude, to his tendency to get incredibly frazzled whenever having an important conversation, be it with a boss or a beautiful woman. And since the engineer’s bosses erroneously believe him to be the nephew of the CEO, the life coach is forbidden from revealing his true identity and forced instead to train the engineer under the guise of being a 50-year-old intern doing photocopies. Of course, hilarity ensues.

Max begins by trying to teach Patrick how to behave around women, to spark confidence, and coaches him on a date with the office beauty Vanessa (Anne Marivin). Patrick is completely pathetic: he complains about the wait when Vanessa arrives late, he very loudly slurps his coke through the straw, and by following Max’s advice to “observe and imitate” Vanessa’s actions, Patrick ends up twirling his hair and running his finger across his lips. It’s embarrassing to watch him, and yet, for some miraculous reason, Vanessa likes him for exactly who he is.

Patrick is no better at office politics than he is with women, so similar gags occur. A cruel ambitious colleague in the office works as the evil villain, attempting to sabotage Patrick’s every move, and Max, the man who knows how to do just about everything except clean up his life and make a friend, helps with the rest. The movie is predictable: they bag the client, Patrick bags the girl, Max pays off his debts, and Max learns to make a friend in Patrick while fixing his relationship with his wife. But the point here is the journey, and the journey kept me smiling and laughing throughout. Definitely look for this one on DVD, and in the meantime, check out some of the other comedies that Cinefranco has to offer!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 27th, 2010 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Events, Film, Review, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.