‘My Wife’ Has French Zest for Reality

In the interest of accuracy, Yvan Attal’s fizzy romantic comedy “My Wife Is an Actress” would be better titled “My Wife Is a Movie Star.” There are thousands of struggling actresses who would happily take on the problems of the screen diva Charlotte, played by Attal’s real-life wife, Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is badgered in restaurants to sign autographs, repeatedly asked the same vapid interview questions and required to do love scenes at 8 a.m. with actors who haven’t gargled.

Whether or not they would want to take on the jealous husband played by Attal is anyone’s guess. Attal’s character, also self-referentially named Yvan, doesn’t give much thought to the intimate demands of his wife’s occupation until some schmo acquaintance of his sister starts grilling him about his feelings. Suddenly Yvan is a man obsessed. And he can throw himself into obsession whole hog, since his job as a sportswriter seems to leave him nothing but time to travel between Paris and his wife’s film set in London, or take acting classes so as to better understand the life of an artiste.

The French are very good at taking sit-commy setups and cloaking the machinery with charming and surprisingly resonant comic nuance. (Remember “Three Men and a Cradle” before it was amplified into a strident stateside remake?) In this one, Yvan’s insecurities are contrasted with the determination of his nominally Jewish and very pregnant sister, Nathalie (the appealing Noemie Lvovsky), to have her baby son circumcised.

Speaking as someone who counted four graffiti swastikas on his recent swing through Provence, I found Nathalie’s martyred arguments with her husband (when all else fails, bring up the Holocaust) a welcome satirical blast of real life.

Terence Stamp adds to the self-mocking esprit de corps as Charlotte’s seductive British co-star, a dilettante dabbler in oil paint who gives Yvan good cause to be jealous. Stamp is the good-natured butt of two of Yvan’s more wicked pranks, which send up the Parisian ardor for good brie and exacting enunciation.

What gives “My Wife Is An Actress” its extra juice is the natural energy exchange between the spirited real-life couple, who conjure the sort of credibly warm interplay that is hard to fake and probably harder to reproduce in front of a camera. It’s nice, for a change, to see a romantic comedy in which the falling-in-love part has been dispatched by the opening credits. It leaves more time for the falling-on-your-face parts, which are far more delicious.

MPAA rating: R for language and nudity/sexuality. Times guidelines: Adult situations.

Jan Stuart writes about film for Newsday, a Tribune company.

‘My Wife Is an Actress’

Charlotte Gainsbourg...Charlotte

Yvan Attal...Yvan

Terence Stamp...John

Noemie Lvovsky...Nathalie

A Sony Pictures Classics Release. Writer-director Yvan Attal. Producer Claude Berri. Executive producer Pierre Grunstein. Cinematographer Remy Chevrin. Editor Jennifer Auger. Costumes Jacqueline Bouchard. Production designer Katia Wyszkop. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

In limited release.