People do screwy things in screwball comedies - and we’re tickled when the filmmakers pull off the daftness with panache. Yet it’s hard to raise a smile from the laboriously contrived kookiness of Diane Kruger and Dany Boon’s wildly mismatched couple in French romantic comedy A Perfect Plan.
Even the film’s set up is strained. Kruger’s straightlaced dentist wants to thwart the family curse that dooms every first marriage in her clan to divorce; the second, it appears, is the keeper. Her solution: marry the first schmuck she can find and get a quickie divorce, all so she can then safely marry her boringly reliable fiancé.
Boon’s oddball travel writer is the poor sap she picks, but she needs to throw herself into a farcical globetrotting quest - including stops in Kenya and Moscow - in order to snare him. If Boon’s misfit were more of a catch the film might work, but he’s so oafishly charmless that Kruger’s perseverance seems perverse rather than winningly madcap.
Certificate 15. Runtime 105 mins. Director Pascal Chaumeil. http://youtube.com/v/BBLpafRsrXg
