Mon Meilleur Ami | My Best FriendYet another mismatched-buddy pairing  July 3,
2007 2:38:43 PM
MON MEILLEUR AMI|MY BEST FRIEND: A best friend in 10 days? ...Never.
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The opening-night entry of this year’s Boston French Film Festival, Patrice Leconte’s tetchy and grimly unamusing little comedy positions Daniel Auteuil, in yet another mismatched-buddy pairing, as an unlikable antiques dealer who’s compelled — in a bizarre bet instigated by a tableful of despicable but ostensible friends — to find a “best friend” in 10 days or give up the ancient Greek vase on which he spent too much of his gallery’s cash. The set-up is so labored and unconvincing that it hardly matters when our rodentine hero latches onto Dany Boon’s gregarious trivia buff/cab driver and is instructed in the ways of basic sociability. Boon is meant to be likable, and he is (though one can already see the Adam Sandler remake coming at us like a flung turd), but Leconte, returning to his lackluster ’70s-’80s period of tone-deaf farce, focuses like a West Hollywood executive on penny-ante moralizing.
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