It's always dangerous territory approaching foreign cinema. All the subtitle reading replacing the need to notice what's going on puts many off. A clever way around this many foreign film writers use is to create such a good script you puposley lean back in your seat to capture more of the action. 'Mon Meilleur Ami' feels this is unneccesary.
Stereiotypically named Francois, a hard nosed antique dealer who tends to prefer things of value to people, is shocked to find no-one actually likes him. After visiting an associates funeral to close a deal with his next of kin (this is apparently acceptable in France) and finding only 7 people attending and relaying the events to his gallery's co-owner, she tells him that, at Francois funeral, nobody will turn up as he has no friends. Francois immediatley sets out to prove her wrong and hunts the Paris streets for a friend with the aid of a know-it-all socialite taxi driver. Little do they know friendship is closer than it seems...
I gagged a bit typing that last sentence. That being said, it perfectly captures the cheezy cliched nature this entire film unashamedly throws at you for a very long seeming 93 minutes. I can vouch for the accuracy of that time estimation, as I was watching the minutes tick by on the DVD player instead of paying attention to the film. Luckily, I had figuring out everything that would happen in the film in the exact right order within the first twenty minutes.
The philosophical depth that the French usually try to provide skids down a slippery slope and punctures a lung on the sharp icicle pit below throughout, as the definition of friendship is never found. It also isn't really Francois fault that he has no friends as everyone in Paris seem to be the rudest people in the world, walking away and shouting at him whenever he attempts conversation, but as all his social interactions are filmed from a very long way away, he could have said something that caused their apparently default hatred of him. This technique both robs these scenes (about a quarter of the movie) of any comedy or sympathy with him.
Another thing 'My Best Friend' attempts to do is explore the recently popular concept of 'bromance', a loving fraternal yet plutonic friendship between men. For the first hour, Francois suffers a serious case of bromance blindness, not even acknowledging his taxi driver as an eligible candidate for a friend. Fortunatley we know it's going to happen anyway. Sadly, it doesn't last long, but we knew that was going to happen to.
The final sequence is one of the most bizarre conclusions to an emotional exchange to any film I've ever seen, with the taxi driver (I've tried but I can't remember his name) gets on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and has Francois as his phone-a-friend. They then lay their feelings out on national television while the presenter listens intently, as if he were deeply involved in their affairs. It's a bit like if a member of Hell's Angels was on weeping on his hog while Leonardo DiCaprio sinks into the sea at the end of Titanic before patting Kate Winslet on the arm and riding off to Valhalla.
After a pridictable conclusion, the taxi driver loses all his money in one year and said it brought him no happiness, which Francois agrees with ferverently as they sit at a resturant booth girning at each other like lobotomized hyenas. It was good to finally discover that all the unimaginitive, completley foreseeable straight man romance was just critiquing capatalism. Very subtle
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