Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Paulette lives alone in a housing project in the Paris suburbs. With her meager pension, she can no longer make ends meet.
Paulette is a charming French comedy built around a simple but effective premise: an elderly, cantankerous woman becomes an unlikely drug dealer in the Paris banlieues. The concept gives it a distinctive comic energy and Bernadette Lafont delivers a committed central performance. However, the plot follows a fairly predictable arc of transformation and moral reckoning, and the cinematography is workmanlike TV-movie style without notable visual ambition. The ending leans into sentimentality without fully earning it, wrapping things up a bit too neatly for the edgier tone the film had established.