General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Priceless (2006 film)

Priceless (French: Hors de prix) is a 2006 French romantic comedy directed by Pierre Salvadori, written by Salvadori with Benoît Graffin, and starring Audrey Tautou as the gold digger Irène and Gad Elmaleh as Jean, a hotel bartender she mistakes for a wealthy guest. It was released in France on 13 December 2006 and in the United States in a limited run on 28 March 2008.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Hors de prix; international title Priceless¹
Director and writers	Pierre Salvadori; screenplay by Salvadori and Benoît Graffin¹
Cast	Audrey Tautou (Irène), Gad Elmaleh (Jean), Marie-Christine Adam (Madeleine), Vernon Dobtcheff (Jacques), Jacques Spiesser (Gilles), Annelise Hesme¹
Release	France and Belgium 13 December 2006; United States limited 28 March 2008¹^•²
Runtime	104 minutes per Cineuropa; 106 minutes per IMDb and the US press kit¹^•³
Budget	€11,700,000 (estimated)³
Box office	2,116,384 admissions in France; $28,041,861 worldwide gross, of which $2,165,188 in the US and Canada⁴^•³
Reception	82% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 76 reviews; 7.0/10 on IMDb²^•³

Spoilers

Plot

Irène (Tautou) is a thirtysomething woman who lives comfortably by attaching herself to older, very wealthy men. She is the companion of Jacques (Dobtcheff), who is twice her age and rich, and he brings her to a resort hotel on the French Riviera for her birthday. While Jacques sleeps, Irène goes down to the hotel bar and mistakes Jean (Elmaleh), a bartender who also works odd jobs to stay afloat, for a well-off guest; he encourages the misunderstanding and takes her up to the hotel's Royal Suite for the night. When she discovers he is broke, she leaves.⁵^•⁶

A year later the two meet again at the same resort. Jean still carries a torch for her, and when Jacques breaks off the relationship after learning of Irène's infidelity, she lets Jean spend his savings on her lifestyle until his money is gone. Jean then finds himself taken up by Madeleine (Adam), a well-to-do widow in her sixties who wants a kept man, and Irène, amused by their new equality, gives him a crash course in the art of the gigolo: how to flirt, seduce, and take. Irène meanwhile takes up with Gilles (Spiesser). The two keep crossing paths and gradually realize how much they care for each other.⁵^•⁷

Production and release

The film was produced by Philippe Martin for Les Films Pelléas with France 2 Cinéma and France 3 Cinéma, with backing from the Région Provence Alpes Côte d'Azur, and was distributed in France by TFM Distribution.¹ Gilles Henry was the cinematographer, Isabelle Devinck the editor, and Camille Bazbaz wrote the music.¹ Filming took place in part at the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz, Pyrénées-Atlantiques.³

Salvadori said the idea grew out of a conversation with Graffin about what worried them: the triumph of pragmatism and an ambient pessimism that can tip into cynicism, the sense that to win a place in the sun every means seems acceptable. He cast Elmaleh after seeing him in the theater, wanting an actor who could be almost invisible and neutral and gradually acquire elegance, with a precise burlesque body; he praised Tautou's ability to pass from one feeling to another within a single scene.⁴ Tautou, who had become internationally known through Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie (2001) and had played Sophie Neveu in The Da Vinci Code (2006), said Salvadori wrote her a role very different from what she had done before.⁸^•⁹

After the French release on 13 December 2006, the film rolled out across Europe and beyond through 2007, reaching the United Kingdom on 13 June 2008.¹ The Samuel Goldwyn Company released it in the United States, where it carried a PG-13 rating for sexual content and nudity.²

Box office

The film opened strongly in France with 527,454 admissions in its first week (13 to 20 December 2006) and reached a cumulative 2,116,384 admissions by mid-February 2007.¹⁰^•⁴ Abroad, it sold 876,836 admissions for €4,362,931 in 2007, placing sixth among French films outside France that year, behind titles including Arthur and the Minimoys, La Vie en Rose, and Paris, je t'aime.¹¹ IMDb records a worldwide gross of $28,041,861, including $2,165,188 in the United States and Canada, against an estimated budget of €11,700,000.³

Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 82% Tomatometer from 76 reviews and a 75% Popcornmeter score from more than 10,000 ratings; the critics consensus calls it "a light, farcical rom-com that features sharp performances from Audrey Tautou and Gad Elmaleh."² Metacritic's sampled reviews ran from the Wall Street Journal's 80, which compared the film to Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, to the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, who gave it 1 out of 5 and called it a "gruesomely unfunny and tacky comedy-farce."¹²^•¹³ The Washington Post praised Tautou's comic use of her bubbly personality and described Elmaleh as "a sort of poor man's Buster Keaton."¹²

The film received the Jacques Prévert Award for Best Original Screenplay, and Bazbaz's music won the Raimu de la Comédie award for film music; it was also selected for the French Film Festival in Israel and the Franco-Mexican Film Festival.¹⁴

Title and comparisons

The French title Hors de prix means "overpriced, outrageously expensive" or something one cannot afford or reach, rather than "priceless" in the English sense of an object whose value cannot be determined.³ The US distributor's press materials describe the film as "a fresh re-imagining of the cinema classic, Breakfast at Tiffany's," and critics have repeatedly drawn the same line between Irène and Holly Golightly, with the Observer noting that Tautou had remained a kooky ingénue on the international scene since Amélie in 2001.¹⁵^•⁷^•¹⁶ A Warwick University study of French romantic comedy listed Hors de prix among the exemplary French films of the 2000s that received enough distribution abroad to guarantee significant visibility.¹⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026