Mr Blake at Your Service review - John Malkovich in unlikely role as an English butler

This genial oddity – its pithier French title is Complètement Cramé, meaning something along the lines of completely burnt out – stars John Malkovich and Fanny Ardant and is directed by best-selling author Gilles Legardinier, who adapted it from his own novel. Its goofiness works, some of the time, partly because of Malkovich’s French, which is fluent yet delivered in a halting drawl with an English/American accent so bad it’s almost good.

Still, he does bring a strange zest to the unlikely role of Andrew Blake, a successful English businessman whose French wife died recently. He longs to return to the French château where they fell in love 40 years previously when he was teaching her English.

He’s under the impression that it’s become a guest-house and leaves London to take a room there and find peace, to the despair of his jolly friend Richard (Al Ginter), who asks him why he doesn’t go to visit his daughter in Australia instead. Richard, who likes making jokes about the French penchant for suppositories, also has a French wife and he and Andrew like speaking French together. Richard’s schoolboy accent is possibly even worse than Andrew’s. It's all very foolish.

At the vast Domaine de Beauvillier, Blake is greeted by a bossy housekeeper, Odile (the late, great Émilie Dequenne, who died of cancer in March aged 43) who directs him curtly to the servants’ entrance. There are vague echoes of a menacing Malkovich as the gaunt, dead-eyed Tom Ripley, married to a French woman and living in a sumptuous manoir in Ripley’s Game (though the movie is set in Italy rather than France). And there’s a bit of camp slapstick in both films that Malkovich seems to relish.

It becomes clear the next morning that Odile thinks Blake is there for a staff job that she’s advertised. This is part of a plan to encourage the grieving Nathalie Beauvillier (Ardant, wafting around charmingly), whose husband died four years ago, to resuscitate the crumbling money-pit of a château. But Odile is not as mean as she seems: when he explains about his dead wife, she takes pity on him and lets him masquerade as an English butler.And so the fun begins: he irons the newspaper and burns it; eats Odile’s charismatic cat Mephisto’s lunch; mistakes the sink-unblocking fluid for wine; gets shot at by handyman Philippe (Philippe Bas); tries to wean Nathalie off her faith in postal-scam jackpot letters, and finally becomes a sort of major-domo counsellor for the château’s inhabitants, including Mephisto, for whom he installs a cat-flap, or, as Odile calls it, a magic door. He also helps pregnant cleaner Manon (Eugénie Anselin) deal with her recalcitrant boyfriend. “They’re all as lost as me,” he murmurs to a photo of his wife. He keeps his daughter’s stuffed squirrel at his bedside and feels he’s let her down in some way that’s never explained.

He and Philippe, who can’t get Blake’s name right – Mr Steak, Mr Fake, Mr Cake (yes, it’s very silly) – become firm friends after the shooting incident. They play chess and trade insults about French and English characteristics. Philippe shows him his hedgehog hibernation huts. Very nice, drawls Blake, though I’m not sure that the hedgehogs really need little windows with tiny curtains?To help the gruff Philippe win back the affections of Odile, Blake puts on an alarming wig and smudged lipstick and pretends to be her. He shows Philippe how to improve his table manners, prodding him with a stick each time he makes a mistake. It’s a very bizarre scene, as is the balaclava-wearing robbery they undertake to recover Nathalie’s jewels. By the end, these lonely people have been brought together by Blake’s formidable organisational and empathetic skills. In helping others, he finds new reason to live. The finale is pat: Santa lists, tidings of comfort and joy. Not very Ripley.

• More film reviews on theartsdesk