Most English speakers are doubly disadvantaged when they watch French films. We don't understand the language, and we haven't had a strict French education, which ensures that most of the audience has been forced to get familiar with writers like Molière, la Fontaine, Beaumarchais, and Marivaux: all masters of a kind of dry, tart, ironic comedy we just don't have in English. 'The Chef's Wife' (the French title, which means 'We almost got to be friends,' is really on the mark) is in the main line of this tradition.
In a small but upscale country town, the wife of the chef at a fancy Michelin-starred restaurant is suffering mid-life career anxiety. She goes to a harried, fretful but dedicated occupational counselor for advice. So far so good; but both women are suffering from severe delusions about their real problems: the wife is an all-devouring co-dependent, the counselor (a divorcée) thinks she's a just-the-facts person, immune from emotional entanglements. Their collision, two black holes of need spiraling inward on each other, is the comic spine of the movie. At the focus of their orbits is the chef himself, a warm but uncommunicative man, who expresses his love in hors d'oeuvres and amuse-bouches, not in words.
The two women, played by veteran comédiennes with scores of films between them but working together for the first time, are utterly superb. The chef, played by an actor more usually seen with a pistol in his hand than a saucepan, is an ideal figure to engender deceptive fantasies. The rest of the cast, drawn from the seemingly bottomless well of superb French character actors, supports the principals with high honors. And the script, by actor/director Ann le Ny, is a sleek unobtrusive machine for producing awkward encounters and comic misunderstandings. This is French cinema with an accent aïgu: funny, even farcical, but never, never dumb.
