''Madame'' is a 2017 French comedy-drama film directed by

Amanda Sthers Amanda Queffélec-Maruani (born 18 April 1978), known professionally as Amanda Sthers, is a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker. Biography Sthers is of Tunisian Sefardi and Breton origins. She has written ten novels which ha ...

. The film is a satire of the class divide in today's Paris.

Plot

Anne and Bob, an American couple living in Paris, organize a dinner party and invite twelve friends. Bob's son arrives by surprise and the total number of guests is now 13. The superstitious Anne asks her maid, Maria, to pretend to be a rich Spanish friend and join the table. Maria meets David, a British aristocrat. Bob’s son, who is not a fan of his stepmother Anne, tells David that Maria is actually royalty but will not admit it. They both like each other and start a relationship. When David tells Maria he knows who she really is, she believes he knows she is a maid. Anne is furious when she learns her maid has entered a relationship with David. Anne, who is not ashamed of her own classism, is herself worried that she has outgrown her role as a younger wife and takes the blooming relationship with her friend and maid personally.

Cast

Harvey Keitel Harvey Keitel ( ; born May 13, 1939) is an American actor. He is known for his portrayal of morally ambiguous and "tough guy" characters. He first rose to prominence during the New Hollywood movement, and has held a long-running association with ...

as Bob Fredericks * Toni Collette as Anne Fredericks *

Rossy de Palma Rosa Elena García Echave (born 16 September 1964), known professionally as Rossy de Palma, is a Spanish actress and model. She is well known for her roles in films by Pedro Almodóvar such as ''Law of Desire'', ''Women on the Verge of a Nervou ...

as Maria *

Michael Smiley Michael Smiley (born 1963) is a Northern Irish comedian and actor. He is perhaps best known for his roles in the films ''Kill List'' (2011) and ''The Lobster'' (2015). Early life Smiley was born in 1963 in Belfast and grew up in Holywood with ...

as David Morgan * Brendan Patricks as Toby * Sonia Rolland as Marinette *

Stanislas Merhar Stanislas Merhar (born 24 January 1971) is a French actor. He was born in Paris in a family of immigrants from Slovenia. He works in cinema, television and theatre. In 1998 Merhar won the César Award for Most Promising Actor for his role in the ...

as Antoine Bernard * Sue Cann as Mandy * Tom Hughes as Steven Fredericks * Joséphine de La Baume as Fanny * Ginnie Watson as Jane Millerton * Tim Fellingham as Michael * Violaine Gillibert as Hélène Bernard * Alex Vizorek as Jacques * Ariane Seguillon as Josiane * Salomé Partouche as Gabriella

Production

The film started shooting in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

on 20 July 2016 for six weeks.

Reception

review aggregator A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services (such as films, books, video games, software, hardware, and cars). This system stores the reviews and uses them for purposes such as supporting a website where users ...

website

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

, the film has an approval rating of 44% based on 36 reviews, and an average rating of 5.42/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "''Madame''s retrograde trappings are further weighted down by unlikable characters and an overall inability to do justice to its themes." On

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...

, the film has a weighted average score of 45 out of 100, based on six critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".

References

External links

* {{IMDb title, 6045466 2017 comedy-drama films French comedy-drama films 2010s French-language films Films about interclass romance Films set in Paris 2010s English-language films 2017 multilingual films French multilingual films 2010s French films