How to Buy Friends and Influence People

If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog, but if you want a friend in Paris, get a checkbook.

That's the gist of Patrice Leconte's cynical-to-sentimental arc of a story upon which the clever Frenchman's new film "My Best Friend" is built.

Most people in this town will recognize Leconte's hero Francois Coste not because he's played by the brilliant Daniel Auteuil but because he's got a cellphone surgically attached to his ear. The deals, the plots, the schemes, the profits, the losses, the red ink, the black ink, these are his realities. As for people: They hardly register as carbon-based life forms.

Francois, a careerist in the worst sense (he's an antiques dealer, but he could easily be a GS-13, a lieutenant colonel, a senior vice president, an account supervisor, a coach, a journalist), lives for work. He is his job; his job is him. So obsessed is he that he doesn't even notice what's lacking; he simply blasts ahead, fueled by delusion and narcissism, confident despite the endless indicators to the contrary that he is beloved. As for interrelating, he's as tone deaf as a gooney bird that's just flown through a nuclear airburst.

One day at a dinner celebration, his business partner, Catherine (Julie Gayet), points out that he is friendless. (She's piqued because he hasn't recognized a young lady at the far end of the table who is her lover. He hadn't even noticed she is gay.) He is dumbfounded. He asks all the celebrators if this is so. They confess -- they can't stand him.

She proposes a bet: In 10 days, if he cannot produce his best friend, a certain expensive antiquity that he has recently acquired would become her property. Thus he begins his attempt to make friends, which is the main thrust of the film. It's hilarious because he just has no feel for this sort of thing. When he makes small talk, he sounds like a young prince among fishmongers. When he tries to go hale and hearty, he almost gets slapped silly. He is guilty of the worst sin of social intercourse, which is Trying Too Hard. He just doesn't have the social IQ to figure the shifting tides of emotion and incentive that underlie even the smallest conversation. He has no ability to fabricate empathy -- empathy is as alien to him as hot dogs -- and he seems not that good at minor skills like appropriately placed laughter, encouragement by subtle touching, eye contact and listening. He's hunting butterflies with a .44 magnum.

This is comic if pathetic to us, melancholy to him but weirdly moving to one man -- his cab driver Bruno (Dany Boon, who looks like the love child of Randy Quaid and John C. Reilly). And why is Bruno so impervious to Francois's charmlessness? He's another lonely guy.

The movie is just as ruthless and unsentimental with Bruno's many pathologies as it is with Francois's -- a heady whiff of reality most welcome, especially when one considers how these two unattractive personalities would be handled in more-prone-to-please American hands. Bruno is one of those guys who knows too much; he thinks he's impressing you when he drones on about the architect of this bridge or that alley. In two seconds you're yawning, but Bruno is, of course, clueless to sub-verbal expressions, as in "Oh, I see it's time to tie my shoe." Bruno's answer would be, "On the other hand, that bridge down there was built in 1834 and it is said that the sound of the stones being lowered into place annoyed Victor Hu --" "SHUT UP!!"

It finally dawns on Francois that . . . Bruno will be his friend. And his first thought is: How can I work this to my advantage? How can I use Bruno's innocent love to my benefit? And what does he use as his primary leverage? His checkbook. He buys a table from Bruno's father at an exorbitant rate, he impresses Bruno with his beautiful apartment, and finally he figures out a scam by which he could prove to his friends that Bruno is his best friend.

It's all very clever until the end, when Francois tries to stage-manage an esteem-building exercise for Bruno. It involves the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." Self-doubting Bruno, manipulated to compete by Francois, must also learn to trust, and by that trick both Francois and Bruno are cured and bonded. The ploy is perhaps too glib, perhaps too cheesy.

Leconte is always a deliriously clever director -- his "Ridicule" and his "The Girl on the Bridge" stand out as vivid films on subjects no one in America would even consider. Possibly he's trying too hard here to be liked, just like Francois. But as long as he's merciless, he's great fun.

My Best Friend (94 minutes, at Landmark's Bethesda Row) is rated PG-13 for profanity.