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'Priceless': Worth every penny

By Roger Moore The Orlando Sentinel

Priceless is a perfectly precious film trifle that reminds us that the French still know the difference between a romantic comedy and a sex farce.

In Hollywood, films from The 40 Year-Old Virgin to Wedding Crashers, The Heartbreak Kid to Knocked Up have blurred that distinction, rubbing the sweetness right out of romance with raunchy, comic sex and raunchier and even more comic sex talk. But here's a movie about a lovesick bartender who falls for a genuine gold digger and who chases her from old man to old man all along the Cote d'Azur to prove it. One night with Irene (Audrey Tautou, an unlikely but sexy bombshell) will do that to a guy.

As Jean (Gad Elmaleh) chases Irene from four-star hotels to swank shops, chi-chi restaurants to regal bars, he and we learn it's not about that one night or the S-E-X, but about the E-U-R-O-S.

That's how they meet. She's bored with her aged sugar daddy. She hits the hotel bar. He's a hapless pushover who dozed off sharing a $120 cigar with his last bar customer of the night. He's in a tux, the hotel's uniform. She mistakes him for somebody rich.

Thus does the bartender bed the bimbo. She tiptoes back to sugar daddy, but the sugar daddy won't have it.

He tosses his cookie out on the street. She turns to Jean, who proceeds to go through his checking, savings and retirement accounts to ”keep“ her. He maintains the charade so long as his bank will let him.

Irene can't let herself be touched by his lovesick attentions. Well, not much. She gives him the full gold-digger treatment, making him treat her to pricey clothes and pricier meals that she doesn't eat, all just to watch Jean squirm.

That's when this film from ­director Pierre Salvadori (the ­darkly funny suicide comedy Apres Vous was his) delivers its twist. Jean has lost his job and ­bankrupted himself over a woman who is plainly out of his league. Whatever he's in, love or lust, is a mere distraction to her.

The only thing that can save him? He must become like her, ”kept“ by a member of the well-heeled, used for his youth, his sexiness.

Elmaleh has made a career of playing French working-class oafs entangled with the affairs of the beautiful and powerful. He plays this sort of lost, lovesick loser with élan.

And Tautou, in an array of bikinis and plunging-neckline dresses, is nicely cast against type here.