"L'étudiante et Monsieur Henri" or "The Student and Mister Henri" is an award-winning French 95-minute movie that premiered a year ago already, but it took quite a while for the film to reach theaters outside of France. The writer (also of the play) is Ivan Calbérac and he is also the one who directs here. Almost 15 years since he started making films, this is probably his most known work now. The lead actress is Noémie Schmidt and you could maybe call it her breakthrough role. Claude Brasseur and Guillaume de Tonquedec play the two major supporting characters, father and son. This film is advertised with the general plot idea that a young woman is short of money and in order to be allowed to stay in her apartment, she has to help her landlord. "Help" in this context means that she he has to approach his son because the landlord really doesn't like his son's daughter and wants her to fins somebody better. All this is a true and happening in the film, but I personally felt this was just one part of the movie and not relevant to an extent where the film should be defined by this.

In my opinion, it is much more about the life of the female main character, about her relationship with her parents, with lovers, with the landlord and his son, but also with the son's wife for example or with her colleagues and friends. And it is also, at least as important, about her professional life, about her struggles to get accepted into university, about her ambitions as a composer and pianist and about her work at a pub as a waitress. This is all that is much more in the center of the film than her being forced to try to destroy another man's marriage. And as such, thanks to the strong lead performance by Schmidt, the films works pretty well for the most part and I believe that she elevated the material considerably with her acting. Her character really is this movie. But I still believe all the other (major and minor) supporting players do a good job. Yes the film gets a bit stereotypical at times with Brasseur's character, but it is not so bad that it really hurts the movie. It's also overly melodramatic occasionally with the over-the-top tragic music when she sees she failed the test or with the old man's death at the end, which was not really necessary or also the slightly cringeworthy reference about the night that the child was conceived. Predictability is a minor concern for this film as some plot twists were really not to be expected, but others kinda were. For example, it is never really to be expected that the "breaking the marriage" plan would work out to the father's liking as he is presented as a good guy overall really or the death is really expected with these last words that he is telling her, which was very melodramatic.

But as a whole, thanks to Schmidt and also de Tonquedec, I believe that the good easily outweighs the bad. The main character is easy to like thanks to her clumsiness and I actually feel the film is very relevant in terms of the lack of orientation of the generation of people who have the main character's age. Where to go? What to do? There is one quote from another character about the protagonist not having found her purpose yet and this was one of the best quotes and scenes of the film because it felt very real and accurate and it's a statement that describes hundreds of thousands of young people these days. These struggles in professional (and also slightly less in her private life) are the heart and soul of the film in my opinion and they make it easy to like the character and as a consequence the movie because everybody else are just side characters in her life and story. I must say though Schmidt looks so stunning in here for the most part that I wanted to tell the character that she finally needs to try modeling as a career path. To close this review, I want to emphasize again finally how Schmidt makes it work and from what I saw here I think she may have a bright career ahead of her, maybe also in Hollywood films. I recommend the watch.

"L'étudiante et Monsieur Henri" tells the story of a grumpy old man, who invites a young woman to live with him in order to make some money. While he isn't very welcoming at first, he soon develops a plan to make her end his son's marriage of which he disapproves heavily.

The plot is well-known for French films, just think of "The Intouchables". This one ha its moments, it comes with great acting and has a smart sense of humor, at least in some of the situations. Sometimes it tries to be more artsy than it is but instead it is quite entertaining. Personally, I didn't like the last third of the film all too much because everything became a bit implausible and problems began to solve themselves while people pretended some situations never happened.

All in all this is a light-hearted comedy that takes some well-known concepts and puts them together individually. What comes out is a film that lacks some courage but has its beauty.

I sometimes wonder if - should I ever relocate to France and have access to a steady diet of films of this quality - I would eventually become jaded and long for a London where, if you're lucky, you'll get a half- decent French film every other Fall. I doubt it because films as good as this are the oxygen of my cinema going despite what the trained seal at filmsdefrance says and if a certain actress is featured you could say I'll be there with Bels on. Now that she has just turned 40 Frederic Bel is not getting the ingenue roles she did in the three films she made with Emmanuel Mourcet - though this film is very much in the style of Mourcet - and here she is the much-married wife around whom the plot resolves given that her father-in-law, the great Claude Brasseur, despises her and bribes student Noemie Schmidt with the offer of a six- months free rental provided she will do her best to break up the marriage. Hardly War And Peace but entertaining and loaded with charm for all that. Put my name on the first DVD off the line.