Some films aren’t that great but you like them anyway. That, for me, was Mr Blake at Your Service! (aka Well Done! aka Complètement Cramé), a cosy French comedy with, crucially, a starring role for John Malkovich.
Deep breath for the plot. He plays a big something in London who gives it all up on a whim and heads off to France, to revisit the chateau where he first met his beloved but recently deceased wife 40 years before. Emotionally and spiritually exhausted, Andrew Blake is hoping for some balm for the soul by staying as a paying guest in the old place, which now does B&B, or so he mistakenly believes. Instead he winds up with a job as a butler to the impoverished chatelaine. In the first of this movie’s many, many cases of mistaken identity, she doesn’t realise he’s a big muckety muck. She’s not even sure she can afford a butler, but maybe it’ll help her open up a few rooms and get in some paying guests. So instead of a nice room and scrambled eggs for breakfast, Mr Blake winds up with a napkin over one arm serving tea and is billeted in cramped servants quarters under the eaves. And he goes along with all this beause? It’s the only way he can get to be near to the memory of his dear departed.
Everyone Mr Blake encounters at this magnificent place is as spiritually fried as he is. Odile, the fierce, forceful but lonely ball of energy who keeps what’s left of the operation going. Manon, the lowly maid who’s pregnant by an absent boyfriend. Magnier, a fat-fingered gamekeeper-cum-gardener-cum handyman with an unrequited passion for Odile, who won’t talk to him. And Madame herself, poor but elegant, keeping up appearances and too proud to tell anyone how broke she is.
There is a shape to these things and it can be taken as read that by the time the end credits roll Mr Blake will have been changed by the whole experience. By subsuming his ego to a greater enterprise, he will start feeling something again for the first time in years. We can also take it as read that he’ll have fixed everyone else up as well, because this is an “undercover millionaire” fantasy in disguise. See also Russell Crowe in 2006’s A Good Year, except here there is more Downton-esque upstairs/downstairs business, with the odd “yes, m’lady” thrown in for good measure.
The opening credits also tell us that this is a caper comedy, which isn’t really the case at all. However, that rinky-dink theme music and those cute fonts do eventually just about justify their use in the film’s final stretch, when at a semi-farce semi-canter things are wound together in a way that just about satisfies the demands of the story, if not entirely those of plausibility.
It’s the warm-hearted classic Hollywood fantasy, of a sort that Preston Sturges or Ernst Lubitsch did so well. The actors are excellent – Fanny Ardant as Madame Beauvillier, Émilie Duquenne as the feisty Odile, Philippe Bas as the leaf-mouldy Magnier and Eugénie Anselin as the chirpily desperate Manon.
It’s Malkovich’s performance that’s the squeaky wheel. He smiles a lot, which is always unnerving. And he speaks throughout in French. The IMDb tells us that he is fluent in the language. And while that may be technically true fluent doesn’t just mean knowing the words but also being able to speak “with facility”, as my dictionary puts it. I’d take issue with that. Andrew Blake may speak a lot but Malkovich’s usual silken effortlessness is not to the fore. His line readings are stilted, energy-sapping.
It would not matter so much if he weren’t in it so much, or if first-time director Gilles Legardinier had compensated by swinging his camera a bit more towards the other players. Or if Legardinier were as good with a camera as he is on the page – he also wrote the original novel.
But the location is magnificent, the other actors are magnificent, even Odile’s cat Mephisto is magnificent. It’s lovely. The sun shines. It’s a gorgeous French chateau. It’s Fanny Ardant. Malkovich, stilted or not, is still Malkovich. You know what I’m saying?
Mr Blake at Your Service! – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
