This truly bizarre film has a substantial reserve of goodwill to draw on: among its blue-chip cast are John Malkovich and Fanny Ardant, and it’s also the final film of the Belgian star Émilie Dequenne, famous for winning the best actress award at Cannes for her nonprofessional debut in Rosetta in 1999, who sadly died of cancer in March at the age of 43. It is a broad and baffling dramedy, directed by the bestselling French author Gilles Legardinier, and adapted from his 2012 novel Complètement Cramé! (Completely Burnt Out!).
Malkovich plays a wealthy grieving widower called Andrew Blake, supposedly from England, who, to ease his broken heart, takes a job as a butler in a French chateau whose owner (Ardant) has fallen on hard times. It is a sentimental journey for him, as many years ago he first met his French wife, Diane, in the chateau’s sumptuous grounds. Among the below-stairs gallery of wacky characters is grumpy but golden-hearted housekeeper Odile (played by Dequenne).
What makes this film such an ordeal to watch is Malkovich’s amazing line-readings in French, in his laboriously slow and unmistakably American accent. He very rarely snaps out of the language, and it would have been fascinating and horrifying to hear him do an English accent. Be that as it may, audiences will learn to tense and flinch in advance as Malkovich opens his distinctively pursed lips and strangles French word after French word after French word: “Je ne perrrrrrr ploooo res-tayyyyyyy – Dee-ane nay ploooo lahhhh …” He sounds like Dr Hannibal Lecter having smoked a hundredweight of weed, doing a derisive impression of an unctuous French headwaiter he intends to eat.
There is one truly terrifying moment. To coach the groundsman in how to prepare for a hot date, Malkovich dresses up in drag and sits opposite him in blond wig and pearls – the most extraordinary drag appearance since Jeremy Irons as the master-of-disguise jewel thief in Claude Lelouch’s And Now … Ladies and Gentlemen. A deeply peculiar misfire.
• Mr Blake at Your Service is in UK and Irish cinemas from 3 October.
