Random Movie Recommendation: Hors de Prix / Priceless
Published: January 31, 2010
Look, sometimes we all need a silly movie about pretty people in pretty clothes amid pretty settings. But frequently, romantic comedies suffer from what one might call the Pretty Woman syndrome: sure, it’s fun while one watches it, but afterward one is left with the cold hard reality animating the story – what Rachel Leigh Cook’s character called, in the one good line in She’s All That, “that whole hooker thing.”
Which is why I’m such a fan of the frothy, barbed Audrey Tautou vehicle Hors de Prix (aka, Priceless), which I caught on TV last night and rewatched, loving it even more the second time. It’s basically Pretty Woman in reverse: instead of a whore proving herself worthy of being bought by a man by demonstrating that she can be a woman too (but better than your run-of-the-mill woman, because she’s still a whore, and therefore pretty fun and also in your control, since you can always just return her like a malfunctioning Cuisinart if she gets too uppity), Hors de Prix shows a hapless man pretending to be rich getting fleeced by a woman who reveals herself to be a type of whore, and the way he wins her is by becoming a whore too, therefore equalizing their relationship. And oh, how they laugh!
Plus, Audrey Tautou is totally hot and fun throughout the whole thing, erasing all that Da Vinci Code yuckiness like a cleansing spa, and the dude is hot too, if you’re into that whole sad-eyed Moroccan dude thing (which, um, I totally am).
I recommend!
I like the sound of this – “Pretty Woman” always irritated me for exactly the reasons you mention here. I’ve adored Audrey Tautou since “Amelie.” Will add to Netflix queue.
Spoken like someone who has never had to return a food processor. Unlike prostitutes, they expect you to return these things without bits of food gunking up their working parts. Fucking snobs at Gimbels.
I very much enjoyed this review. Thank you.
@CBL: Gimbels?! Did you drive there in your Rambler? You’ve heard that Nixon isn’t president anymore, right?
@BRB: Long time no see! Always a pleasure to read you.
Rene: I think Chillbear is Nixon.
BRB: And it’s INSTANT Streaming Netflix gratification. Thank you, sir.
BJohnnie: I really can’t stand to think of Mama P as Pat. Could she be a plumber, instead?
@Chill: I know! They wouldn’t take back my eight-track player either.
@Rene: Yeah, the holier than though liberals ran him off.
@BJ: That would make a lot of sense.
@Vox: Was it because it was stuffed with cabbage?
Chillbear wrote “Gimbels” for me, I believe. He knows I have a weakness for Defunct Department Stores.
My idea of foreplay is someone whispering in my ear: “Bamberger’s, I. Magnin, Marshall Field, B. Altman, Bon Marche, Sterns, Ohrbach’s, Gimbels…” Then to bite my neck at the exact correct moment and utter, “Fortunoff, Fortunoff!”
Gimbels! My grandmother called up my mother from Gimbels in Milwaukee once as she “could not walk another step.” My mother was busy with my tiny self and told her to go to the movies across the street. The film that week was Butterfield 8 and Nana was MAD!!! She apparently mentioned for years how my mother forced her to watch that trash!
One of my childhood portraits was also in the window of that branch. I used to love their hot fudge sundaes. I’m going to watch Lawrence Welk now.
@Chill: Well, of course it was. How else was it going to pick up radio signals? Sheesh.
I mistrust French comedy. Perhaps it’s gotten better since I was a young, but when I lived in Paris for a year, my most sophisticated French friends would bray like jackasses at the most inane French comedies. Jerry Lewis syndrome. They secretly love slapstick. They like to see people making fools of themselves as they fear they might do.
Or they did, twenty years ago. My beau was mortified at my teenage self bumming a smoke from a couple at La Coupole. Just not done! Sophisticated Parisians then lived in such fear of social faux pas, making a fool of themselves. Which is why they loved it on screen at the cinema. French humour is so very different than Anglo-American humour- the bourgeois French still believe there are social taboos to be broken- like asking a stranger for a cigarette.
Not done! It’s funny that 1950’s movies often portrayed the French as free-spirited and bohemian. It was because having a mistress was tacitly accepted, the “little woman down the road”. Ooh-la-la, topless nymphets in advertising. French society is patriarchal and sexist and bourgeois at the core, they were never the sexual adventurers of the American imagination in postwar movies. They’re actually uptight-not crazy about gays either!
But: I’m an Old now. I wonder if things have changed there since, what with banlieux filled with African immigrants , unassimilated and scorned by French society, setting fire to cars to protest how they’ve ben shut out. BeRightBack, you describe Tatou as a “whore” a lot there. Which makes me think things haven’t changed that much with alleged French comedy. But I’ll give it a go. Not really, I think I’ll watch something English and funny instead.
@B’ness: It sounds like the French would fall in love with the buffoonery that is my life as long as I filmed it and slapped it up on screen. Interesting. It may be a new market for my videos.
I’m going to watch this for her in that dress alone.
@VOXPOPULI: I’ve already added it to mine.
OH, i can’t believe i blathered all that last night when BeRightBack was just trying to say how he enjoyed a French comedy. Rude and stupid of me, please forgive BRB.
“Life is like a French film. Fascinating, until you realize there is no plot.”
–No Idea Who Said It