Fabrice Luchini News

Fabrice Luchini and Natalia Verbeke star in the French comedy A'The Women on the 6th Floor,A' which opens Friday at the Osio Cinemas in Monterey.

The film doesn't blaze new trails, but it dramatizes the stories of those servants with an engaging mix of romance, droll humor and upstairs-downstairs social consciousness.

The French excel in two film genres in particular: Intimate dramas in which people wring their hands and smoke a lot of cigarettes, and pleasant baubles that wash over you like a summer breeze, delightful and inconsequential.

Set in Paris in 1962, Philippe le Guay's engagingly frothy comedy is a kind of upstairs-downstairs variation that somehow manages to slide past questions of class difference and worker exploitation as if they were not there.

If whether your morning egg is properly cooked makes or breaks your day, it's a pretty safe bet your life isn't exactly a nonstop thrill ride.