Cédric Klapisch's Ma part du gâteau | My Piece of the Pie (2011)

Cédric Klapisch recognises that he's left-wing, but also that his films don't make a similar forceful kind of political statement as Ken Loach and Robert Guédiguian.

Pretty Woman is mentioned by a number of reviewers, the Roy Orbison song of the same name is among the string of records played in Ma part du gâteau, and in an interview Klapisch mentions that film, along with Les Intouchables, as movies which illustrate enormous class divides.

Pretty Woman is evidently the more appropriate film to compare Ma part du gâteau with, as it depicts a very rich man making money out of money, confronted an attractive woman of very low social standing, although that is perhaps where the similarities end: Ma part du gâteau doesn't end in the pair getting together but in them separating; Stéphane (Gilles Lellouche) is a ruthless businessman with scarcely any redeeming human features, whereas Richard Gere's businessman has; furthermore, Pretty Woman was over twenty years before Klapisch's film, and the fictional woman in cinema has moved on, evolved.

A frequent criticism made of Ma part du gâteau is that it is caracatural, whereas Klapisch stronogly disagrees: the film was released a little after the sub-prime scandal, and Klapisch states that the guilty rich bankers should have been punished for causing the scandal to begin with: the world really is made up of extremes of rich and poor, and France (Karin Viard), who is an unemployed forty-two-year-old from Dunkirk who finds work as a femme de ménage to Stéphane, of course represents the 99% of the French population, Stéphane the rich 1%. The two groups very rarely meet, and of course never on equal terms.

The politics of the film are obviously the main point of interest, but it is also interesting to see the differences in psychology. Stéphane is obviously highly successful at his job, indeed so successful that he neglects the outside world: he can't keep a woman, he can't look after his child, in fact he's nothing more than a callous child himself. France, on the other hand, in spite of an earlier suicide attempt, is a mature woman determined to survive in a hostile world which is nevertheless still capable of working-class solidarity, and is determined to do the best for her children.

Endings are often difficult, but at least this film avoids any amorous happy end. And on the way to that end there are some very amusing moments, such as France (on two separate occasions) bursting into song when she's ironing: a tremendous performance by Karin Viard and a very engrossing screenplay by Klapisch.