Mr. Blake at Your Service!
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
1 hour, 50 minutes
Stars: John Malkovich, Fanny Ardant, Émilie Dequenne
Writers: Christel Henon, Gilles Legardinier
Director: Gilles Legardinier
In Theaters, Streaming August 5
Some years ago, attempting to impress my new father-in-law, I let him listen in on a phone interview I was doing with John Malkovich. It was easy to see just how highly Malkovich valued our time together, because he chose to speak with me while walking through the streets of Paris, shouting above sirens and once slipping into speaking French while, I could only imagine, buying a baguette at a corner bakery.
Still, always the pro, Malkovich gave me everything I needed for the article I was writing. I ended the call. My father-in-law, an information science professor who’d helped invent digital computer language in the 1950s, looked at me for a long moment and finally said, “And they pay you to do that?”
I thought of that episode more than once while watching Mr. Blake at Your Service!, a fun and frothy little film, set in the French countryside. Malkovich plays an Englishman who, except for a line or two, speaks French throughout. A proud Francophile, Malkovich lived in France for a decade and directed theater there, so he is as comfortable speaking the Gallic tongue as he is playing All-American villains in films like In the Line of Fire and Con Air.
There’s not a villain to be found, though, in Malkovich’s new film, and I think it’s part of a trend. I call it the “Ted Lasso” effect: Movies and TV series without any significant bad guys; stories that focus on a group of disparate people who — while some may at first appear antagonistic — ultimately, unanimously, want only what’s best for everyone.
Mr. Blake at Your Service! is just such a gentle comedy/drama; a welcome cloud of friendliness where the good people are golden, the gruff people are merely misunderstood, and the troubled will soon find relief.
Malkovich plays the titular Andrew Blake, a retired, super-successful London businessman who, grieving the loss of his wife, has shut himself off from his friends and longtime associates. Seeking solace in the past, he departs for France, and the chateau where he first met his beloved spouse.
Confusion ensues when he shows up at the place which, for reasons that remain unclear, he understands to be a bed and breakfast. He’s greeted at the door by Odile (Émilie Dequenne), the no-nonsense head of the household staff, who assumes he is there to apply for a job as a butler.
Andrew, with nothing else to do and no particular direction in his life, shrugs and leans into the misunderstanding (which, if nothing else, enables us to experience John Malkovich in a butler’s uniform).
While fumbling his way to bottom-line butler proficiency, Andrew also manages to solve the personal problems of virtually everyone he’s associated with: The estate owner, Nathalie (French screen legend Fanny Ardant) is struggling financially — how convenient that her new “butler” Mr. Blake is a business whiz. Housekeeper Manon (Eugénie Anselin) is pregnant and her boyfriend has taken off — Mr. Blake clues her in on the care and feeding of a terrified male. Magnier, the gardener (Philippe Bas), is stupid in love with Odile — Mr. Blake helps him sand down his rough edges in order to properly woo her.
And, of course, Mr. Blake himself — formerly adrift and lonely — comes to his own service by filling his life with new, endlessly good-natured friends.
First-time director/cowriter Gilles Legardinier — author of the best-selling novel on which the film is based — steeps his characters in the sumptuous settings of the villa, a real-life palace in Brittany. Moving from one elaborately furnished room to the next, walking the manicured grounds with the turreted villa dominating the background, Malkovich & Co. inhabit a fully realized world of timeless, if dwindling, aristocracy.
Ardant, regal and resilient as the chateau owner, glides through the proceedings like a guardian angel. Dequenne’s assured performance as Mr. Blake’s immediate superior is tempered by the sad fact that the actress, among France’s most beloved film stars since winning the Best Actress award at Cannes for Rosetta (1999), died of a rare form of cancer earlier this year at age 43.
The film’s glue is Malkovich, who has, in his long career, managed to raise portraying a vague sense of menacing quirkiness to the realm of high art. It’s fun to see his Andrew keep a stiff upper lip through various indignities, and the actor often finds a smooth, soothing tone of voice quite different from the strangulated, one-twitch-from-freaking-out one that helped make him a star.
He’s clearly having a ball with Mr. Blake and his buddies. And, yes, he gets paid for that, too.
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