Spanish housemaids in Paris are like Mexican farm workers in Texas. They’re overworked and underpaid, treated badly, kept on a lower social level in a permanent underclass. They’re “The Women on the Sixth Floor,” a pleasant little French comedy that opens here today.
Set in 1962, it’s a feel-good piece that might have made its points a little more strongly, but director Philippe Le Guay, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Jerome Tonnere, is content to keep it predictable, avoiding the strong social commentary whose doorstep he reaches, but whose door he will not open.
Fabrice Luchini, as Jean-Louis Joubert, keeps the piece moving well. He has a slightly bemused air, and a naivete that could be frightening. He and his wife, Suzanne (Sandrine Kiberlain) live on the fifth-floor of a six-floor apartment building. It’s an old building, with huge apartments. In addition to the large luxurious places where Jean-Louis and his peers live, there’s a sixth floor, where small bedrooms and a communal bathroom are rented to the maids who work in the building.
Jean-Louis is oblivious to the situation, and Suzanne, painted in evil colors by the director, is the obvious villain of the piece. She’s greedy and mean-spirited, rude and demanding of the maids, cold in the bedroom but hot in the designer’s dress shop. She wants to redecorate the bedroom of her late mother-in-law, but a holdover French maid, Germaine (a charming, crochety Michele Gleizer) thinks it would be disrespectful to the dead. An argument ensues and Germaine leaves. It’s never clear whether she quits or is fired, but it makes no difference. She’s gone.
Suzanne soon hires Maria (the lovely Natalia Verbeke), who is recommended by an aunt who lives on the sixth floor.
It would be easy for Jean-Louis to fall in love with Maria and run away to Miami Beach, but this pudgy, shy stockbroker falls for all of them, the cute Maria and the elderly, chubby, buxom women who might as well be living out “La Boheme.” He joins them for paella, he repairs the bathroom, lets them use his home phone to check on a relative’s pregnancy, drives them to visit the shrine of their favorite saint.
Silly?
Sure, but there are more twists to the story and, eventually, an honest finish to what has become a real love story.
The Women on the 6th Floor opens today at the Tivoli.
— Joe