Well, not just her life, but her sensibility. Nothing if not eager to please, Castella holds forth on his likes and dislikes, praising a play that Clara's crowd found insufferable or disparaging "faggots" over dinner. Clara tolerates him, but just barely. Her friends mock him rudely, but soften up a bit when they learn that he has money to spend. Meanwhile, his bodyguard is sleeping with bartender Manie (director and co-writer Agnès Jaoui), whose own lifestyle choices -- she deals drugs for extra cash -- make him uncomfortable.

More generous than the uncharitable Small Time Crooks, the film sees Castella not as a lost cause, but as someone who's struggling to come to terms with his lack of aesthetic sense. Selecting and purchasing a painting from a gallery exhibition or shaving off his signature moustache in response to an off-handed comment from Clara, Bacri plays Castella as a clueless but sympathetic eavesdropper who admires other people's good taste from a distance.

The revelation for me, a decidedly casual Francophile, was that Jaoui and Bacri, previously seen in Resnais' On connaît la chanson (Same Old Song) and Klapisch's Un Air de Famille (Family Resemblances), wrote those eminently watchable films as well as Resnais' Smoking/No Smoking. That's some awfully high-quality output, though it remains to be seen whether the duo will ever conjure up an honest-to-goodness masterwork. Like its predecessors, Le Goût des Autres (The Taste of Others) is smart, funny and good-looking, but its drama is unmodulated and the overall effect is utterly transient. When it's over, you can almost imagine that you never watched it, though you'll feel good for having enjoyed it.