Mr Blake at Your Service! film review: Very good, madame

The charming French comedy Mr Blake at Your Service! is a genteel version of John Landis’s 1983 box-office hit Trading Places.

John Malkovich in Mr Blake at Your Service!

The charming French comedy Mr Blake at Your Service! is a genteel version of John Landis’s 1983 box-office hit Trading Places, in which a rich white man and a poor black man swap lives.

The titular Mr Blake (John Malkovich, who is fluent in French) is a successful English businessman who leaves London to become a butler at a manor house in northern Fance.

The reason? The de Beauvillier estate was where he, working as an English tutor, met the mademoiselle who would be his wife for 40 years.

She has died four months before and he wants to “go back to where it all began”.

The offer to join the downstairs staff is a surprise as he arrives looking to rent a room, but he goes along with it. “Playing a butler could be quite amusing,” he muses.

And he’s right about that for viewers of this film, which is the directorial debut of bestselling French novelist Gilles Legardinier. He has co-adapted (with Christel Henon) his 2012 novel Completement crame!

The French title, which can be read as Completely Burned!, has a double meaning. In one of his first tasks, ironing a newspaper, Mr Blake burns the stockmarket pages.

He jokes about the oil price. As he comes to know the people in and around the manor, they wonder if his mind is “fried”.

They include his boss upstairs, Madame de Beauvillier (Fanny Ardant), a cook (Emilie Dequenne), a maid (Eugenie Anselin) and a shotgun-toting neighbour (Philippe Bas).

There’s also an ever-present cat, Mephisto (real name Nouchka), who reminds me of the judgmental feline in the recent Netflix miniseries Ripley.

While Mr Blake trades places in going from master of the universe to domestic servant, the main comic vein is the age-old differences between the English and the French.

A highlight is when Mr Blake and the neighbour face off over a chessboard and discuss the Battle of Waterloo.

The strengths of this film are the perform­ances, the script – the director’s novelistic skills are evident in the dialogue and characterisation – and above all the feel-good factor.

It’s a sweet exploration of how new life can blossom in unanticipated ways – even Mephisto plays a part in this – and how new friends can be found in unexpected places.