Toggle navigation Menu. The Girl from Monaco He's assigned a bodyguard by the woman's family - the bodyguard is played by Roschdy Zem - and the lawyer is stunned by how easily his bodyguard falls in and out of quick, meaningless sexual relationships, and asks for advice. It just so happens that the bubbly weather girl he tries out his new tricks on Louise Bourgoin, plucked from obscurity not unlike that of her character had a past sexual relationship with the bodyguard, and he instantly distrusts her; he suspects that she might be trying to deliberately distract the lawyer from his case, because Lord knows that's what happens, especially once he falls in love and discovers that she's Monaco's village bicycle.
I mean, no and yes. The situations are farcical, but we never really laugh at them, and given how contrived most of the movie is, there's not any sense that we're supposed to take anything except on face value. If it's melodrama, it's melodrama we're not meant to view ironically.
Well, is it a drama about sexual psychology? It's as shiny and easily-popped as a soap bubble. If it were American, it would be a twee little indie that might make a small hit at Sundance, but mostly everyone else would ignore it. But it's French, and there's a certain ineffable Frenchness to it that makes it seem like it's all very serious even when it's plainly all very silly. It's awfully nice to look at, though, and it flies right on past.
Here's what I know: I'm glad I saw it. I just can't quite set my finger down on why that is the case. It's certainly not at all the movie that the ad campaign promised, a fluffy sex comedy about an old man and a girl a third his age getting it on under the watchful eye of an unspeaking bodyguard. It is, when all is said and done, a French movie, which means that however fluffy it might be, it also has a healthy dose of "what a fool the human animal can be in matters of love and lust.
On one level, the film's pleasures are wholly ephemeral: the lovely Monaco scenery, Bourgoin in skimpy, revealing costumes. Something of a cinematic beach read, you might say.
