"Ensemble, c'est tout" is a lightweight of a film, but nevertheless it portrays one in hundreds of generations, each of which fights the conflict of how to manage a good life. Do you follow your dreams, or won't it be possible? Do you let a twist of fate interfere with your dream? Laurent Stocker's character Philibert has to struggle with a speech impediment, but still wants to be an actor and a comedian. He was the standout for me in this movie. How do you reach your life targets when you don't even have the time to set them in our modern society? Guillaume Canet's character is disoriented like so many people around us. Is escaping some of the social constraints a way to really be able to live today? Is communication between the generations possible? Audrey Tautou's and Françoise Bertin's characters try to gain answers to these questions. To conclude, Claude Berri made a very nice film, for which he also adapted the screenplay from a novel by Anna Gavalda.

Claude Berri is a director who often seems on the verge of becoming a name outside France but somehow doesn't quite make it. His films are interesting - One Leaves, The Other Stays - to excellent - Lucie Aubrac with very little dross. Now he's taken a popular French novel and cast Audrey Tautou in a lead for which she's almost but not quite suited. She plays a gifted anorexic artist who has elected to work as a cleaner to her mother's disappointment. She becomes friendly with an eccentric aristocrat, Laurent Stocker, who lives in an immense apartment which he shares more or less unaccountably with a surly chef, Guillaume Canet. When he realizes that Camille (Tautou) is ill Philbert (Stocker) takes her to live in his apartment and nurses her back to health, this allows for the Benedict and Beatrice element between Tautou and womanizer Canet who also has an elderly grandmother in hospital. Against the odds the three form a bond and bring the grandmother into the menage when she leaves hospital and that's about it. Stocker, who generates all of the action tends to become low man on his own totem pole so that his own development as an actor who finds his own romance takes something of a back seat to Tautou and Canet. Never less than interesting it doesn't quite make it to the next level.