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Jesse Peretz's follow-up to the painfully mediocre but wonderfully soundtracked First Love, Last Rites sounds like something George Costanza and his buddy Jerry might pitch to NBC after frantically coming up with the idea during the ride to 30 Rock. While nobody is court-ordered to become somebody else's butler, The Château does feature one chief manservant and his small staff whose lives are turned upside-down when two very odd American gentlemen become their new bosses. And like a proposed Constanza production, nothing really happens in the film, but that doesn't stop it from being pretty darn entertaining.
The Americans are brothers, and they're an extremely unlikely pair of siblings at that, as one is white and the other is black. Graham Granville (Paul Rudd, Wet Hot American Summer) is a nebbishy, pseudo-intellectual from Lawrence, Kansas, while sibling Allen (Romany Malco) sells "dick products" online from his Los Angeles home and acts like he was raised in the 'hood despite being adopted by what we can only assume was an upper/middle-class family.
The Château takes place over one week, and as it opens, Graham and Rex (it's what Allen insists on being called) have just learned they've inherited a French estate from a dead uncle they didn't even know they had. Upon arriving at their new digs in Pithiviers, the boys have communication problems with the château's staff (highlighted by Graham's hilarious attempts at speaking en Français, which is all spelled out with subtitles). They eventually discover the manor is in utter disrepair and buried in mounds of debt, and realize they'll need to sell the place before it collapses and is rendered worthless.
This, of course, doesn't go over too well with the staff, even after Graham and Rex promise to only accept offers from potential buyers who agree to keep the butler (Didier Flamand) and crew. As if that wasn't stressful enough, the brothers start to compete for the affections of a young maid (Sylvie Testud, who resembles a French version of the beautifully homely Lumi Cavazos from Like Water For Chocolate and Bottle Rocket). Mostly, though, The Château is about the Jarmuschian communication difficulties between the characters, whether it's between English and French, black and white, man and woman, clueless American buyer (Grounded For Life's Donal Logue) and slightly less clueless American seller, or even via phone between France and the United States.
It's all enough to make you think The Château was crafted by an Englishman who harbors ill feelings toward both the Americans and the French, since neither comes across too sympathetically here. The film was actually penned by Peretz based on his own experiences traveling through Europe, though the word "penned" might be an exaggeration. Filmed with handheld digital cameras, The Château was shot over just 10 days and without much of a script, as Peretz let his talented actors improvise with a loose idea of where things were headed. The only major drawback is that the digital video is sometimes distractingly grainy after being blown up to 35mm, especially during the dark scenes (part of the château's problem was a lack of electricity, so there's plenty of scenes lit only by candles).
1:31 - Not Rated
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