Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...plot is complexity itself. Romuald (Daniel Auteuil) runs a yogurt company. He is having an affair with his secretary. His wife is having an affair with his assistant. The assistant botches a vat of yogurt, triggering a rash of food poisoning. Two other colleagues of Romuald's frame their boss on an insider-trading charge, and soon Romuald is fired. If only he would listen to Juliette (Firmine Richard), the office cleaning woman, who has been uncovering scraps of the conspiracy while maintaining the bluff invisibility of the servant class. And if Romuald listens to this black Cassandra...
...pleasures Romuald and Juliette offers is this seductively devious plot: a doomsday version of everybody's office politics. Serreau also nicely blends corporate intrigue with romantic camaraderie. By film's end any skeptic will believe that natural combatants -- rich and poor, white and black, man and woman -- can be made gracious allies. It takes just a little goodwill and a very good film...
Sound familiar? It could be the plot from any one of innumerable comedies written by innumerable authors on the Continent and in Britain from the time of the Renaissance to beyond the Restoration...
...this revival, the bitterness and irony that should contribute to what little comedy has transcended the mist of the ages is lost in an atmosphere of comraderie. With cuckolding and a corrupt clergyman taken so casually by the performers, the plot of the play seems trivial...
Brett Barbaro is all too innocent for Callimaco. His "golly-gee" performance jars with the masterful seduction in which he involves himself. Barbaro reaches his most immature moments when he adopts the persona of a doctor to further his advances (a plot twist reminiscent of Moliere). It simply is not believable. And James Baker's portrayal of the stupid and foolish husband whose wife is the object of this intrigue is wooden and uninteresting...