A comedy of class and nationality issues set in bourgeois Paris

The Gilded Cage/La cage dorée is a routine charmer that contains various ingredients older US arthouse audiences like. To begin with it states its movie-glossy view of its locale with romantically hazy panoramas of major Paris tourist landmarks. Its ground level focus is a nice middle-aged expatriate Portuguese couple, Maria and José Ribeiro, who have lived in Paris for some 35 years. Maria is the concierge of a posh Haussmannian building, another attractive locale, which provides her and José with a convenient if cramped ground floor apartment called the "loge." José is the foreman for a successful French building contractor. Both are indispensable to the French people they work for and serve. They begin to recognize how fulfilling and involving their roles are when news arrives of an inheritance from a family member back home involving houses and a farm producing port wine that provides an income of €200,000 a year. José, at least, has always wanted to return to a house in their native land. Here it is, and then some, an ancestral one, with a payoff. Essential condition for receiving this inheritance: the family must move back to Portugal.

The real issue is how José and Maria can resolve this conflict between their longtime ties in Paris -- intensified by the presence of their son Pedro (Alex Alves Pereira) and older daughter Paula (Barbara Cabrita), both of whom identify as essentially French -- and the rich inheritance and ideal conditions for returning home to Portugal. But instead of considering the issues involved in making a decision this serous and practical, in the manner, say, of a Jane Austen novel, Ruben Alves' film just jokes around about them for an hour or so.

The movie rushes all too eagerly to provide comic complications. Suddenly it emerges that Paula is romantically involved with the handsome Charles (Lannick Gautry), the son of José's boss Francis Caillaux (Roland Giraud) and ditsy wife Solange (Chantal Lauby).

Francis brings José to a fancy restaurant meal with entrepreneurs planning to build a shopping center and he's such a paragon of old-world craftsmanship and integrity the fat cats hire Francis on the spot to do the construction provided José's in charge. Francis also offers José a fat raise. And it turns out that the construction company has been on the skids of the past two years and if they can't take this job, which requires José's presence to sell, they're screwed. On the home front, the apartment building managers not only guarantee José and Maria can occupy the "loge" free of charge for a long time to come but will expand it, showing they're a lot nicer and more devoted to Maria than they may have seemed.

The status issues are driven home in an intentionally lighthearted but slightly gag-inducing manner when, to certify the union of Charles and Paula, their respective parents have a sit-down dinner at the "loge" full of embarrassing class comedy with Maria painfully trying to act posh and Solange Caillaux equally awkward in her straining to act down-home and her revealed ignorance of things Portuguese. The blurb's "sprawling cast of oddballs" is displayed throughout the film. Pedro in turns embarrasses himself by pretending to his lyçée girlfriend that his family is among the apartment building's rich occupants instead of mere caretakers.

La cage dorée has been nominated for a 2014 César for "best first film" and Ruben Allves has certainly delivered an able and fluent effort -- except that it is a mass of sit-com-like situations and clichés and offers nothing new. One might contrast Philippe Le Guay's recent period social comedy The Women on the Sixth Floor/Les Femmes du 6e étage about a rich financier (played by the impeccable Fabrice Lucchin) who discovers working class earthiness in 1962. This other treatment of Hispanics in Paris is quite conventional, meant only to amuse and warm the heart. But it still offers more solid matter than this fluffy effort -- which, while a bit thin on realistic detail, also isn't quite as hilarious and fun as it may intend.

La cage dorée, 90 mins, was released in Franch 24 April 2013. Critics were generally favorable, with the Allociné press rating a decent 3.5. Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Unifrance joint 6-16 March 2014 series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema . R-V showings: Sunday, March 9, 9:30pm - WRT; Tuesday, March 11, 6:00pm – IFC; Saturday, March 15, 7:15pm - WRT.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.