Orchestra Seats film review

certificate_12A

ORCHESTRA SEATS

An ensemble comedy from France, Orchestra Seats stretches both the viewer's patience and credibility and is one of the weakest imports to cross the Channel in recent times. It's the sort of fluffy nonsense that gives French cinema a bad name and one in which the smugness and self-satisfaction levels are turned all the way up.

A young woman named Jessica (Cecile de France) leaves the comparative wilderness of Macon in the French countryside and follows her grandmother's footsteps to the country's capital. With little idea of what to do or where to stay, she talks her way into a job as a waitress in a bar in the theatre district and over the space of a few days encounters a variety of characters including a concert pianist, a famous TV actress and an old man about to auction off his life's possessions.

Jessica's rabbit-like behaviour - she seems totally unaware of the norms of adult life - is presumably meant to endear her to the audience but is only likely to raise basic questions such as how someone would be unaware that Paris' top hotels cost an arm and a leg and are therefore unaffordable to someone on a waiter's income.

It's meant to be an homage to the theatre and the arts in general, but comes across as an empty affair, full of one-dimensional characters, played by actors who presumably thought they were involved in some form of high art. Even the American director and producer Sidney Pollack finds himself embroiled in this unfunny mess, playing a visiting film director looking for the cast for his new film.

Potential viewers would be advised to steer clear: instead they would be much better off renting Agnes Jaoui's sublime Look at Me (2004), which deals with similar circumstances in a sassy and sophisticated manner. Orchestra Seats pales in comparison to such a recent masterpiece, and its pretensions to either convincingly entertain or have anything of note to say are little short of embarrassingly futile.

Paul Hurley