Gad Elmaleh as Jean and Audrey Tautou as Irene in Pierre Salvadori’s Priceless, which is loosely based on the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Samuel Goldwyn Films

Priceless is a romantic comedy from France that’s loosely based on the film made of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Because it’s French, it’s a touch sexier and franker than the 1961 New York-based American version, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard. The facts that Hepburn’s sweetly daffy Holly Golightly was a gold digger and that Peppard’s struggling writer was being kept by an older woman were not so blatantly presented as they are in Priceless. Consequently, despite the charms of Audrey Tautou (of the 2001 hit Amelie) as Irene Mercier and the hapless innocence of Gad Elmaleh as a hotel bartender who is taken in by a rich widow, it all seems more mercenary . . . and not quite as much fun.

Irene, especially, is a girl who has never met a pair of designer shoes, diamond earrings or couture dresses she doesn’t crave. And she knows how to get these consumer baubles by snaring wealthy men.

When she first meets Elmaleh’s Jean she mistakes him for a man of fabulous wealth, a fantasy he encourages by taking her up to one of the hotel’s swankiest suites, an easy feat for him because as a hotel employee he has access to the master key and knows which suites are vacant. But she is with someone else at the time.

It’s not until a year later when their paths cross again. The spark is still there, but it’s not long this time before Jean’s deception is uncovered by Irene. Only it’s too late for her, because she has dumped her current sugar daddy for Jean.

Despite that, Irene decides to take Jean for everything he’s got, though he doesn’t have much. She insists they take a suite at a posh hotel. Then she steals his credit card. Dumbly, madly in lust, he goes along with all this, even emptying all his savings account into his credit card, much to the frustration of the audience. Yes, he seems an idiot, but one who has incredible luck in getting out of tight spaces.

That’s part of the fun of Priceless — watching Jean squirm and then seeing how he can come up with a way out through quick thinking or sheer blind luck. The film is a collection of contrivances and coincidences and improbable situations as Irene and Jean keep bumping into one another.

Director and writer Pierre Salvadori tries to keep things frothy, helped by the fact that Priceless is played out on glamorous sets on the French Riviera. Especially amusing are moments when Irene and Jean come up with ways to be alone together — even inside the dressing room of a ritzy clothing store — while their lovers wait outside the booth.

Yet in a sequence late in the film when things have momentarily turned very bad for Irene, one can’t feel too much sympathy. Tautou has played her as so calculating that it’s not easy to warm to Irene. It seems as though she is getting what she deserves as her deceit catches up to her. One feels more empathy for Marie-Christine Adam as Jean’s keeper, an attractive widow who uses her money to attract companionship.

Elmaleh, a French comic star, has more success winning sympathy as Jean. But he seems such an idiot that one pauses to wonder whether we like him for himself or just feel sorry for him.

***Priceless

Starring: Audrey Tautou, Gad Elmaleh, Marie-Christine Adam. In French with English subtitles.

Rated: PG-13, contains sexual situations, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com