Mr Blake At Your Service

A cosy “cure for melancholy” about middle-aged love and contentment, with Malkovich at his elegant best.

This mild rom-com focuses on a 60-something English widower, Andrew Blake (Malkovich), who moves from London to rural France to work as a butler after his wife’s death.

The film starts with a glittering awards ceremony in London held for Blake, but the guest of honour is missing it. He plans to escape to France instead to visit a castle-slash-guesthouse where he and his late wife met. He is mistaken there as answering the ad for a live-in butler and decides to stay on in the role, so he can reflect on how he met his wife. Blake explains, with an elegant, throw-away wistfulness that trails him for most of the movie: “I’d do anything to live here again, even just for a while.”

The castle/guest house staff gradually take to him in his new job. There’s the frosty yet regal castle owner, Madame Nathalie Beauvillier (Ardant), struggling to keep her house running, and who, like him has lost a spouse. She is aided by her no-nonsense housekeeper Odile (Emilie Dequenne) who used to work as a restaurant chef, before having her heart broken by her ex. Odile is determined to drill Blake into the perfect butler with a “cure for melancholy”.

Blake thinks his fellow staff are “as lost as I am” but they overcome their cliches about each other’s nationalities, by teasing each other about “eating snails on festive days” (the French) or being “uptight asexuals” (English). The film is subtitled in French, apart from a few sentences, with Blake playing a Brit despite speaking American-accented French. Inexplicably, he also speaks French even with native English characters.

The other staff are effectively likeable, including Manon (Eugenie Anselin) who is pregnant after being dumped by her boyfriend, and benefits from Blake’s fatherly care. There’s also a gruff groundsman Magnier (Phillipe Bas) given to wandering around at night with a shotgun, and looks like a “grumpy frog” according to Blake. But Magnier has a softer side, as might be expected, involving harbouring unrequited love for Odile and building tiny, cute dollhouse-style shelters for hibernating hedgehogs. There are also a few non-human performers, including also Odile’s fluffy, pampered Persian cat Mephisto, who also has a nice sense of comic timing.

There are the usual lovable fish-out-of-water mishaps – while ironing Madame Beauvillier’s newspaper, Blake accidentally sets fire to it; he unintentionally eats the cat’s gourmet lunch, thinking it is his meal; and teases Odile about Mephisto getting chubby.

One standout comedic scene sees Blake, while attempting to give Magnier a lesson on table manners to impress Odile at an upcoming dinner, dress up in a wild blonde wig, huge turquoise earrings and badly-applied scarlet lippie. There’s no reason why Blake should drag up – unless in a nod to his femme fatale characters in 1999’s Being John Malkovich – but it still looks hilarious.

United by Blake’s help around the house, the staff become a family, as he reflects: “I came for the past and I feel good in the present, here,” as he finds contentment with his new life.

The pace does drag at 1 hour 50 minutes, and does involve a lot of middle aged characters ruminating picturesquely on the past. One of these sees Madame Beauvillier mention that her late husband had a 20-year love affair with another woman and asked for her to be buried on the estate, causing her heartbreak. Another moment that lurches into melodrama occurs when Blake is injured falling off a ladder and nearly dies in hospital, but returns – mysteriously minus any broken limbs. Unsurprisingly, there’s beautiful lighting, causing everyone to look gorgeous and even downpours are picturesque.

The closest thing to a climax occurs when Magnier and Blake threaten the lawyers who arrive to repossess the house. There’s an amusing moment when the two elderly men don balaclavas and fake accents to disguise themselves to steal back their employer’s jewellery.

The plot only really falters towards the end, with a syrupy-sweet Christmas heralded with Mephisto is discovered to not be chubby, but have a litter of cute little kittens. At this point, the only way things could be cuter is Magnier presenting Odile with a tiny baby hedgehog, gift-wrapped in a Christmas red bow.

Despite these flaws, Mr Blake at Your Service manages to be (largely) whimsically funny without being too syrupy.

Mr Blake at Your Service is coming to UK & Irish Cinemas from 3rd October 2025.