Prete-moi ta main (I Do: How to Get Married and Stay Single) poster & wallpaper

Alain Chabat, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Bernadette Lafont

Life is easy for 43-year-old Luis, a happy single guy, fulfilled in his job of star nose with a perfume creation company, cosseted by his mother and five sisters. It could have lasted for a whole life...( read more  read more... ), but fed up with mollycoddling and helping him, his mother and sisters decide it's time he got married, and the sooner the better!Surrounded and hounded by his family who think only of marrying him off, he comes up with an infallible plan: he'll find the perfect woman who'll pretend to be his fiancee and then, on the day of the wedding, will cruelly dump him. After that, for certain no one will dare even mention the word 'marriage' in front of him. But how do you go about finding such a gem? Luis sees only one solution: hire her! And it just so happens that Emma, his best friend and colleague's sister, has recently arrived in Paris and is looking for a job. The plan is underway. At the end of it lies Luis' freedom!

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72% liked it

4,232 ratings

Unrated, 1 hr. 30 min.

Directed by: Eric Lartigau

Release Date: December 31, 1991

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DVD Release Date: December 9, 2008

Stats: 389 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (389)

  • EarthlyAlien
    September 24, 2008
    EarthlyAlien
    Charming, jaunty and very funny French romantic comedy in the veins of Priceless about a middle-aged man who fakes a girlfriend and a marriage to shut his sisters and mother up. Nothing ground-breaking, remains in conventional (if enjoyable) film territory from start to fi...( read more)nish, but it's juiced up by a light touch and crack timing from two perfectly matched and charming lead actors: Alain Chabat and Charlotte Gainsbourg. If you're looking for a nice little harmless rom-com, try this or any other French import: few can be as fun, charming and un-stupid as they can.
  • deano
    January 19, 2009
    deano
    Great funny, heart-warming tale about love, commitment and family. How sweet and enjoyable this French film is. And Alain Chabat is hilarious and he made his original idea of this comedy-romantic story amazing.
  • Capitansalgado
    September 20, 2008
    Capitansalgado
    I thought I was going to be a typical love movie, but I surprisely found an excelent romantic comedy movie very recomendable and funny, and a good way single men can have ideas of how to stay single and make their families think are married, or die in trying so...
  • ane1213
    August 28, 2008
    ane1213
    i love franch comedies :)
  • jschartrand
    August 2, 2008
    jschartrand
    Full of great and fresh ideas, the movie failed to kept our attention and made us laugh at every seconds with a dynamic rythm. Good, but nothing more.
  • onomatopee
    May 27, 2008
    onomatopee
    Charlotte Gainsbourg est adorable et elle porte le film sur ses épaules, avec l'aide de Chabat. C'est mignon, marrant et tout léger. À voir lorsqu'on a envie d'être un peu plus quétaine qu'à l'ordinaire.
  • rifffinger
    November 16, 2007
    rifffinger
    Spiky French farce that has heart and quirk in equal measure. Neither trait ever dominates or is overbearing; this is what makes this breezily shot, hopscotch paced comic play so consistently entertaining. It takes the American romantic comedy and dispenses with the expected stor...( read more)y beats in the first 25 minutes, leaving you with over an hour of perfectly pitched, left of center comedy coming from the unlikeliest of places and a romance that bubbles and simmers in every scene even when the two leads are at each other's throats. It's a joy to watch it develop and second-guess where it's going next. The antagonism that slowly melts into romance recalls Grant and Hepburn in BRINGING UP BABY, high praise indeed! The film's central conceit, that puts Alain Chabat's Luis through a month of exhausting bad dates, when his mother and 5 sisters decide they've had enough of mothering a man in his forties and decide it's time he get married, has a wonderful sense of the tragic/comic, ticking clock of mid-life crisis; a much more amplified tension than that of any expectant exploding building. The emasculated Luis, too afraid to take on his family, instead hatches a hare-brained scheme: he will find the "perfect woman," pay her to pose as his fiancée and charm his family, but then jilt him at the altar on their wedding day. That way, his family will feel sorry for him and never mention marriage to him ever again. This is from the off, a ridiculous situation in which everything goes wrong and though every nervous, sweaty bead of comic possibility is wrung out of the scenario, the increasingly confused and extraordinary goings on are undercut by the moral implications of this sham, which lends the story a substance all too often absent in this genre. Imagine, hard as it may be, an ever so slightly watchable version of any of mass market American romantic comedy - FAILURE TO LAUNCH for instance - in which Matthew McConaughay's character as a man in his thirties wrestled with the leeching, immoral and irresponsible consequences of continuing to live in his parents home. I knew this film was smarter than your average genre product even before it asked us to weigh up the character's choices. Luis is not the typical non-descript office worker drone, who in the beginning wrongly balances the demands of life with a playboy, carefree lifestyle, he is instead a successful perfume designer, known around the office as "Le Nez" (the nose), who balances the demands of life with a playboy, carefree lifestyle. The film appears to know very well the land in which it lies and every ten minutes or so offers us up these idiosyncratic nuggets to tread a well-worn path subversively.
    This rebellious streak is echoed in the two lead portrayals, particularly that of Charlotte Gainsbourg, who not content to play the pink cardigan clad, glowing girl next door type, wrongly manipulated before love comes a' knockin', presents a firecracker fashionista; a shrewd and insubordinate negotiator who is as take charge as her chic military jackets indicate. Gainsbourg is back on form here after drowning in the stuffy costume drama aspirations of THE GOLDEN DOOR that leaned to heavily on her poor attempts to convey an English accent. By contrast here she is sexy, spunky, charming and full of verve, qualities that can neatly be ascribed to I DO.
  • harrysrana
    October 24, 2007
    harrysrana
    Hilarious. Crying out for a hollywood remake.

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