Philippe Le Guay's '60s-set Parisian upstairs/downstairs, a kind of European version of The Help, has all the ingredients necessary for US consumption: political correctness, platitudes, saucy comedy; and a romance between a middle-aged bourgeois reactionary and a life-affirming, left-leaning babe 30 years his junior. The former is Jean-Louis (Fabrice Luchini), a stock broker and paterfamilias who one day notices the stinking drains on the sixth floor of his town house. That's where the immigrant Spanish maids live, and his growing awareness might have something to do with his own new housekeeper, the stunning Maria (Natalia Verbeke). Fascinated with their tales of woe and hangdog pluckiness, Jean-Louis starts spending more time with the domestics than with the crypto-Fascists who are his friends, family, and clients. Next thing you know he's hiring a plumber, dissing Franco, and ogling Maria's ass. Vive la Revolution!
