Filmmakers seem determined to bring out Audrey Tautou’s sweetness and spunk. She dispensed random acts of kindness as “Amelie,” set off in search of her fiance in “A Very Long Engagement” and played a street-smart but sensitive police cryptologist in “The Da Vinci Code.”
That’s what makes “Priceless” a surprise: Tautou plays a manipulative, gold-digging, label-obsessed hanger-on.
“It’s not necessarily the vibe that I give off, or what I inspire in people,” Tautou told The Associated Press in an interview at a Paris cafe. “So for me it was a fabulous opportunity to be able to construct a character, to do a bit more comedy, to transform myself.”
In “Priceless,” hitting theaters Friday in several U.S. cities, Tautou plays Irene, a dark-haired knockout with a taste for the high life, like luxury hotels on the Cote d’Azur and Chanel and Azzaro evening gowns. Because of her modest means, she attaches herself to rich older men who let her live out her fantasy of being rich.
Her scheme goes smoothly until she somehow mistakes a timid hotel waiter named Jean (standup comic Gad Elmaleh) for a millionaire and, after a night of cocktails with paper umbrellas, goes to bed with him. He falls for her, and finds himself a sugar mama so he can stay in her high-flying world. Irene does everything she can to get rid of Jean, like emptying out his bank account on shopping sprees.
Director Pierre Salvadori, who conceived the movie for Tautou — hanging her picture on the wall while he worked on the script — said he needed an actress who could make Irene’s nastiness somehow palatable.
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