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“Playing a butler could be quite amusing,” remarks the businessman protagonist of French comedy Mr Blake at Your Service!. You can imagine John Malkovich idly leafing through the script on a chaise longue and thinking that playing a businessman playing a butler could indeed be quite amusing. A penchant for whimsical diversion seems to be Malkovich’s main reason for choosing roles these days. He plays this one quizzically larky, delivering his French dialogue with a stiltedness that may conceivably be deliberate; his vowel sounds could provoke the Académie Française to call an emergency meeting.

This soufflé-light farce is the directing debut of novelist Gilles Legardinier, adapting one of his own books. Malkovich plays an Englishman who pays a sentimental visit to a secluded château, and ends up as domestic to its cash-strapped incumbent (Fanny Ardant, laying on the feline purr and enigmatic smiles). Photographed with distracting glossiness, the film largely comprises a knowing catalogue of Anglo-French misunderstandings, with Mr Blake wearily cracking jokes about snail-eating, while the château’s gruff maintenance man keeps mispronouncing his name (Steak, Fake, Cake — ça alors!).

The whole thing is cosily insipid and yet, thanks to its star, irreducibly weird. Mr Blake is supposed to be impishly charming, but Malkovich appears to be surreptitiously in training to be the next Bond villain (perhaps that’s why he buddies up so fondly with the château’s long-haired pedigree cat).

The person who emerges best is Émilie Dequenne, who died of cancer in March, aged 43. As a teenage unknown, she made an unforgettable debut as the lead in the Dardenne brothers’ 1999 Cannes winner Rosetta, then built a very distinguished career in European art cinema. Mr Blake is barely worthy of her talents, yet she gives her all as Ardant’s briskly no-nonsense housekeeper. You imagine she’d have been brilliant in a Feydeau farce. 

★★☆☆☆

In UK cinemas from October 3