Short Takes

PRICELESS A concoction so bright and effervescent it makes Sex and the City seem like a stint in a Georgian gulag—it even has better costumes—Pierre Salvadori’s nimble romantic farce is the kind of sophisticated light diversion that nearly died with Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, a comedy that weighs the cost of everything against the virtue of nothing. Shedding the pixie-waif preciousness she exuded in Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, Audrey Tautou is all curves and sharp angles as a sleek gold-digger who tills a virtual canebrake of sugar daddies. In the ritzy hotel where she’s staying with her latest benefactor, she mistakes a humble clerk (the appealing Gad Elmaleh) for a wealthy fop and romances him; when she learns the truth, she exacts revenge by wiping out his meager finances with her Tiffany-grade tastes. Then a twist places the two on equally precarious sex-for-sale footing—and the movie shifts subtly from the worldliness of Lubitsch’s knowing sex comedies to bracingly cynical Wilder territory. That makes it a rarity: a successful contemporary update that never feels like an imitation. Salvadori treats the opulent settings as an incestuously small but high-stakes playing field, on which players and scorekeepers alike measure their worth in lavish gowns, meals and accessories: He measures their psychic price in Tautou’s hawkish, hurt expressions and Elmaleh’s paid-in-full subservience without rupturing the movie’s comic tone. At the same time, he has an eye for physical clowning that swiftly sketches character—such as Tautou slithering out of a slinky white dress in one very well-practiced step. Like its satisfyingly ironic ending, the movie’s a perfect getaway. In French with subtitles. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at Green Hills)

GET SMART The 1960s Mel Brooks-Buck Henry TV show, a spoof of the spymania James Bond launched shortly after Sputnik, retained its freshness long after almost everything else in the Cold War icebox had freezer-burned. (The CIA spent the next four decades living up to its portrait of clandestine klutzes and peeping Toms parked behind every potted palm.) The biggest surprise about the new movie version—besides the fact that it’s genuinely funny—is how well 40-year-old gags about gung-ho spooks, misfiring gizmos and daft world leaders stand up to reheating. Steve Carell may not have Don Adams’ Tennessee Tuxedo squawk, but his stoic deadpan fits Smart 2.0 (now a slightly wised-up analyst instead of a discount 007) like a shoephone. If anything, he’s even better at slapstick than his predecessor, whether acupuncturing himself by accident in an airplane lavatory or dueling a KAOS supervillain in an impromptu dance contest. Ably directed by Peter Segal, the movie loses some of its infectious silliness during an overwrought climactic chase, but by that point you may be primed to giggle at anything by its playful cast: Anne Hathaway as a competitive Agent 99, Alan Arkin as the gruff Chief, Dwayne Johnson as the dreamboat of CONTROL’s covert ops. After a dud 1980 feature (The Nude Bomb, anyone?) and a few failed TV revivals over the years, the series may seem an odd candidate for big-screen revival, but evidently a sizable cult of Smart has risen—my audience burst into applause at just the sight of the infamous Cone of Silence. Guess the others missed by that much. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday)

THE LOVE GURU Mike Myers likes ice hockey. He also likes Deepak Chopra, a little bit too much. So he pulled together a bit of hockey and a whole lot of Chopra and called it a plot. Building a movie around the efforts of an also-ran celebrity guru to sort out the internal politics of the Toronto Maple Leafs was Myers’ first mistake. His second was to seek Chopra’s blessing and throw him a cameo, thus fluffing a golden opportunity to take a good, strong whack at the guru industry. Kitted out in an orange shirt, Dali mustache, brown-cow eyes brimming with faux-sympathy and lechery, and a fluid libido, Myers’ Guru Pitka, a shaman cursed with lagging behind Chopra on the pop-psych charts, is too like his source to be really funny or really cutting. Indeed, he’s a bit of a dear, and completely upstaged by the charm of a bunch of mega-stars ready and waiting to spoof themselves. Team manager Jessica Alba romps adorably through a goofy Bollywood dance sequence. Goalie Justin Timberlake gives his all to a sing-off with a Céline Dion impersonator. And Ben Kingsley, as a cross-eyed Zen master, hasn’t been this funny since he swanned around in that outsized diaper in Gandhi. The rest is disposable. Now and again some pungent writing (the script is by Myers with Graham Gordy) leaks through to poke fun at the excruciating banality of guru wisdom. But mostly it’s dreary dick jokes and elephant poop, slack directing by Marco Schnabel (a second unit on the Austin Powers movies), and, of all fatal errors, Mike Myers, shooting for cuddly. —Ella Taylor (Opens Friday)