My Piece of the Pie (2011)

Simply Perfect

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

HiThis is a great film I cannot understand the low score, some of the earlier reviewers got the point some missed it.Its the story of a redundant woman who goes to work for the trader who helped close down the firm she worked for.I's about class struggle, family , globalization,love, powerless of the individual.And also it dose n't really take sides as it shows the trader as a victim too.Might be the best film I've seen in the past year.Gerry

Karin Viard is a major star, and Lellouche comes across well too in this social comedy, which is not really a satire. Viard is a girl of the soil who worked in a solid factory all her life, only to have it ruined by resurgent China and the container business. She tries to kill herself, and her three daughters and sister rally round her until she decides to try her luck in Paris, at a school for cleaners where she pretends to be foreign. She ends up working for a complete tosser, in fact the stock speculator who destroyed her factory without giving a thought to the workers. It takes her a long time to find out, and when she does, she is in bed with the jerk and they've just had tremendous sex, something he of course jokes about on the phone, overheard by her. When his toddler son disappears she has the idea of kidnapping him off to Dunkerque to get the tosser over there and face the music. Both actors perform extremely well and the film sweeps you away with the goodness of "France" and the cynical wickedness of "Steve". Thoroughly recommended.

This movie starts out as a pleasant French romantic/comedy along the lines of "Pretty Woman" and "Maid in Manhattan" and you're lead to believe the villain will redeem himself and the heroine will win her man,much like Julia Roberts did with Richard Gere. It doesn't end up so,leaving one with a very disquieting feeling at the end as if the rug has been pulled out from under you.Maybe this is supposed to reflect the way the real world works,but after the wonderful initial set up,in the end you do feel like you've been set up.It inevitably seems under written with a need for a final chapter.Until it shifts gears though, it works,and you feel like you're in for another classic French romance.Even up to the very end you feel like it will shift back to it's light comedy form and everybody ends up happy,(American films do it all the time)but it steers it's way down a darker path of questionable value. I would still recommend this film just for the performance of Karin Viard,who plays France.

Puzzled by the negative reviews of this truly amazing movie about class issues - the way wealthy people live in a "virtual world" where real people are somehow not affected by their decisions to make more money based on the flick of a button on a computer. The film is about how poor people have a necessary need to come together and fight back. Her decision to take the child to Dunkirk in order to get him to face what he has done (buying a business in order to destroy it; shades of Mitt Romney at Bain Capital) allows the community to come together to try to protect her. It's also important to notice that the police are used for repressive purposes to help those in power and not to help those who are hurting.The performances are top-notch, especially Karin Viard as France. She is bold, impulsive, not always nice, bright, intuitive, curious - a fully rounded woman trying to cope with dire economic circumstances.Far from lazy, Cedric Klapisch does a fantastic job of moving back & forth between two very different worlds of haves and have-nots - in fact, I found myself completely engrossed in both worlds inhabited in this film.My interest didn't lag for a single moment. I highly recommend that you see for yourselves and look at it from the p.o.v. not of "reality", but of possibility. I absolutely loved this movie!!! (: Enjoy!