WRITER/director Phillipe Le Guay goes back to the 1960s to tell how stockbroker Jean-Louis (Fabrice Luchini) discovers the not-unpleasant world beyond the compulsion to accumulate more wealth than life’s necessities require.

Jean-Louis owns a Paris apartment building in which he lives an essentially unexciting home-life while his wife Suzanne (Sandrine Kiberlain) indulges strong materialist urges.

On the ground floor, a concierge rules with an iron fist. On the sixth floor live housemaids earning money to support their families in Spain.

The film finds its energy in observing this upstairs-downstairs distinction between social classes and the way the women take enjoyment from their humble lifestyle. Then Suzanne engages sweet and comely Maria (Natalia Verbeke) to clean and cook.

The women and Jean-Louis become increasingly companionable, which gives Suzanne no pleasure. Jean-Louis moves into a spare room on the sixth floor and discovers that lack of wealth does not deny the possibility of enjoying life.  And Maria becomes important to his life.

This is not a typical boy-meets-girl romance. Le Guay gives the characters space to evolve their individual situations. The result is moderately charming and sweetly humorous without becoming mired in saccharine romantic clichés or a surfeit of credibility.

At Dendy and Greater Union