Just before Hugh Bonneville became an internationally recognized actor in Downton Abbey, he starred in a British rom-com that won him the Best Actor Jury Prize at the Monte Carlo Comedy film festival.

The film, French Film: A Frenchman’s Guide to Love, is more Anglophile than Francophile, but its premise explores popularized ideas about the French and their supposed innate je ne sais quoi in matters of love, seduction, and romance.

Hugh Bonneville’s character, Jed, is a struggling novelist who is currently a journalist preparing for an interview with a French director/writer at a public forum in the coming weeks. While watching the director’s masterclass on making romantic films, as well as some (but not all) of the director’s movies, Jed is incredulous of each of his claims about love. So much so that he continually talks about the director’s ideas with his friends, who, it turns out, know and quite like the films.

Struggling in his own love life, Jed’s 10-year relationship with girlfriend Cheryl (Victoria Hamilton) culminates in her saying ‘no’ to his proposal, prompting them to head to couples counseling. It doesn’t help that the counselor is French, which prompts Jed to dismiss his advice further, but Jed is combative by nature, seemingly incapable of appreciating the life that he has. In fact, Hugh Bonneville’s character is quite unlikable at the beginning, which is by design.

Without giving anything away, the film’s soundtrack is a character in its own right. Listen closely to the lyrics of the first song, played while Cheryl and Jed make their way to their first session for counseling. Before the relationship officially ends, we know where it is heading as the evidence is in the melody. Keep tuning in to the music throughout the film as a shift begins to occur. With French music being played while Jed wanders aimlessly around London at various times throughout the film, it isn’t hard to imagine him in Paris, something more often imagined. Donning a scarf, riding or pushing his bike, resting on a bench along the canal to ponder existential questions about love, the only detail missing is Paris.

And so with that, I leave you to watch the film. It is fun, light-hearted, imperfect, and thankfully involves nothing too sensational or absurd beyond the caricature of the French film director who plays the prototype of the suave Frenchman to a “T”. A rom-com to enjoy both for its storyline but also as it takes us back to a time before smartphones. Oh! And even Nigel Slater is alluded to.

~Stream the film here on Sundance Now via Amazon Prime.

Watch the trailer below.

~Explore all of TSLL’s Petit Plaisirs here in the Archives.

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