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Like Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet or 2004’s Whisky, a pretend-partner premise fuels Eric Lartigau’s French frolic. Developed from a proposal by its star Alain Chabat, it’s an affably underachieving genre-spin. Chabat’s Luis is a successful parfumier and feckless bachelor resisting pairing-off campaigns from his mother and sisters. Exasperated, he employs a friend’s boho sister, Emma (Charlotte Gainsbourg), to ‘play’ his wife-to-be. The plan? She’ll jilt him at the altar, thereby immunising the heart-shattered ‘groom’ from future marital expectation. Unlikeliness and predictability are the pitfalls here: a merely glancing knowledge of rom-com formula tells you which aisle it’s taking. But the old gender-tussle tune is played lightly and wittily, with a streak of mischief peppering any risk of schmaltz.
