My Best Friend

When informed at a dinner party that nobody likes him, a careerist Parisian antiques dealer (Daniel Auteuil) makes a bet that he’ll soon be able to produce a best friend. Then he becomes desperate figuring out how to get one. He acquires tutelage—and eventually, you guessed it, friendship—from a sociable cab driver (Danny Boon) who happens to be a little forlorn himself. Director Patrice Leconte’s film, co-written by Leconte and Jérôme Tonnerre and based on a story by Olivier Dazat, amounts to a feel-good buddy movie, but it’s very tactfully done, with performances of warmth and well-tuned specificity. It’s all a little sad, and a little funny, and not even a little condescending, which makes it seem like the right way to comment on human isolation in a glossy urban world of hollow ambition and polite but distant acquaintanceship. Call it a softball, but rejoice that this is still what Europeans consider a high concept.