Chinese Puzzle
Theatrical release poster
FrenchCasse-tête chinois
Directed byCédric Klapisch
Written byCédric Klapisch
Produced byBruno Levy
Starring
CinematographyNatasha Braier
Edited byAnne-Sophie Bion
Music by
Production
companies
Distributed byStudioCanal
Release dates
  • 23 August 2013 (2013-08-23) (Angoulême)
  • 4 December 2013 (2013-12-04) (France)
Running time
117 minutes
Countries
Languages
  • French
  • English
Budget€17.3 million[3]
($18.6 million)
Box office$17 million[4]

Chinese Puzzle (French: Casse-tête chinois) is a 2013 romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Cédric Klapisch. It is the third and final instalment in the "Spanish Apartment" trilogy, following L'Auberge Espagnole (2002) and Russian Dolls (2005).

Plot

Ten years have passed, and the once happy lovers, Xavier Rousseau (Romain Duris) and Wendy (Kelly Reilly), have split. When she moves with their two children to New York City, he also moves there to be near the children. Wendy now lives with John (Peter Hermann) in a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park. Xavier initially stays with Isabelle (Cécile de France) and Ju (Sandrine Holt), a lesbian couple whose child he fathered, but he soon finds his own apartment above a Chinese bakery where he works on a new novel assisted by brief visions of Arthur Schopenhauer and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Having no work visa, Xavier is advised by his lawyer (Jason Kravits) to seek illegal employment and marry for a green card. After saving his taxicab driver from a vicious beating, the driver's grateful Chinese-American family agrees to have Xavier marry one of their relations, Nancy (Li Jun Li), who is amenable and complicit.

His former French girlfriend, Martine (Audrey Tautou), visits him while on a business trip and returns a second time with her own two children on spring break. Xavier and Martine briefly attempt to rekindle their relationship.

The film climaxes when the Immigration and Naturalization Service performs a surprise inspection of Xavier's apartment while Isabelle is using it to cheat on Ju with their babysitter (Flore Bonaventura). Later as Martine is departing for home with her kids, Xavier races on foot to catch her shuttle bus, confess his love, and ask her to stay and live with him. She agrees.

The film concludes with the cast of characters walking in a celebratory parade down a Chinatown street.

Cast

Reception

The film garnered favourable reviews. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the films holds an approval rating of 79% based on 67 reviews, with an average rating of 6.5/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Pleasantly easygoing and consistently funny, Chinese Puzzle offers a suitably endearing conclusion to Cédric Klapisch's Trilogy of Xavier."[5] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 64 out of 100, based on 24 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[6]

The film was nominated for Best Music Written for a Film at the 39th César Awards,[7] and came second for the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival.

References

  1. 1 2 "Chinese Puzzle de Cédric Klapisch (2012)". Unifrance. Retrieved 18 December 2023.
  2. 1 2 "Casse-tête chinois" (in French). CNC. Retrieved 18 December 2023.
  3. ↑ "Les 14 films français qui ont franchi le million d'entrées en 2013" [The 14 French films that reached one million admissions in 2013]. Destination ciné (in French). 28 December 2013. Archived from the original on 6 October 2014.
  4. ↑ "Chinese Puzzle (2013)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 18 December 2023.
  5. ↑ "Chinese Puzzle". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 18 December 2023.
  6. ↑ "Chinese Puzzle". Metacritic. Retrieved 10 July 2019.
  7. ↑ Richford, Rhonda (31 January 2014). "Berenice Bejo, Lea Seydoux, Roman Polanski Among France's Cesar Awards Nominees". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 18 December 2023.
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