MADAME (Amanda Sthers). 90 minutes. Opens Friday (March 23). See listing. Rating: NN
Spanish cinema and fashion icon Rossy de Palma is seen far too infrequently on big screens in this country, much less in an English-language, romantic leading role.
In writer/director Amanda Sthers’s Madame, de Palma plays against her statuesque glamazon image as Maria, a timid but efficient Mallorcan housekeeper employed by bickering Americans-in-Paris Anne and Bob Fredericks (Toni Collette and Harvey Keitel). The wealthy couple is planning a dinner party for 12, but when Bob’s floppy-haired English son (Tom Hughes) shows up, superstitious Anne – the madame of the title – coaxes Maria into posing as a guest to ensure even numbers. During an extended and predictable dinner party scene, anxious Maria downs copious amounts of red wine and tells dick jokes that charm the table and capture the heart of Irish art dealer David (Michael Smiley).
It’s a paper-thin set-up designed less as an entrée into comedy or romance than a belaboured social commentary that name-checks words like “Brexit” but has no real interest in grappling with them.
Though the shrill Anne calls herself a “life-long Democrat,” she is unapologetically racist (“Nobody invites Filipinos to a dinner party,” she explains when Maria suggests another maid should pose as a party guest) and becomes outright hostile when her hard-working immigrant housekeeper upends a long-entrenched power dynamic.
Her anger is compounded by her bland sex life and a threat of financial ruin. Though it’s easy to believe Collette would fall out of love with the decades-older Keitel, it’s hard to buy them as a couple in the first place (much less buy that Keitel would land model Joséphine de La Baume as a mistress). The two actors never settle into a rapport and spend the entire film hurriedly spitting Sthers’s stagey dialogue at each other.
In fact, everyone but Maria comes off as preening rich-people archetypes whose winking lines about European and American stereotypes only further compound the film’s superficiality.
Having hammered home her point about liberal classicism by the end of the first act, Sthers doesn’t know what to do with Maria for the rest of the film. She seems less interested in her immigrant plight (much less the other two maid characters) than Anne’s utterly uninteresting existential crisis.
And though de Palma is a captivating screen presence who can effortlessly impart an air of heavy melancholia, she never finds her groove as the mousy housekeeper.
It’s not entirely clear what David knows or doesn’t know about Maria’s backstory, but that’s not enough to give Madame a sense of stakes and, in turn, momentum as a rom-com, a screwball farce or a social satire.
Instead, the film lands where the tone of political rhetoric clearly is not these days: the mushy middle.
