What have the movies got against a French accent, anyway? The guaranteed panty-dropper of a dialect — so powerful it clinched the Sexiest Man Alive title for French-speaking Bradley Cooper — is rarely employed even in American films set in France, and the new romantic drama Bel Ami is no different. As the trailer proves, Robert Pattinson plays a social climber in period Paris who sexually Ping-Pongs between Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci, and Kristin Scott Thomas, and yet instead of inflecting their speech with grace notes from the language of love, all of the actors speak with that “mid-Atlantic” British accent that’s so often used for any movie set outside the U.S., no matter if the setting is Paris, Russia, or the moon. Everyone’s gonna be British in Les Misérables, too, aren’t they? Alas! Have we made Marion Cotillard a major movie star for nothing?
