Best French Comedies to Cheer Up

CHINESE PUZZLE (2013) 

Summer movies usually spin around genres like horror, crowd-pleasing action and science fiction. If you are looking for something witty, funny, foreign but still NYC-based, Chinese Puzzle is the best  choice you can make. 

It is the third part of famous Spanish apartment trilogy by the director Cedric Klapisch. Good thing is that you do not have to watch the previous installments to understand what is going on. For a foreigner living in NYC, this bitter-sweet comedy is a pure delight. From the first scenes showing contrast between spacious and stylish Brooklyn lofts, Central Park West apartments with a spectacular view and the tiny whole in the wall - Chinatown apartment that the main character, Xavier decides to live in, this is all about NYC reality.

It is not easy to survive in this big city when you are a freelance French writer on a tourist visa, struggling to be there to be close to his children whose mother just divorced him for a rich American.

Xavier, Romain Duris, is trying very hard not to give up, fighting with immigration, trying to make his fake marriage look real and taking a messenger job to survive financially (those are the funniest moments of the movie). 

All the characters in the movie are extremely likable from Isabelle, the lesbian friend who has a baby with Xavier, his old flame Martine (Audrey Tautou) to even new husband of Xavier's ex-wife. It is NYC shown not only from the French emigrants' perspective but the movie also reminds us that in some ways we are all foreigners in NYC and we should make the best of it.

Highly recommended!!! What are the movies you are looking forward to watching this Summer?