My review was written in March 1991 after watching the movie on Media Home Entertainment video cassette.
Martin Sheen gets to play broad comedy in the tv-aimed French feature "The Maid", a typical yet pleasant gender switcheroo tale.
Like its predecessor film "May Wine" from the same producers, "Maid" is a light and frothy trip to Paris where Sheen plays an unorthodox merger specialist hired to be co-equal to executive Jacqueline Bisset at her bank. In the week before he has to report for work in the City of Light, Sheen rather unconvincingly inveigles his way into beautiful Bisset's apartment on the pretext of becoming her new domestic servant.
Job calls for a sort of governess/maid to take care of the pad for working woman Bisset and tend to her cute but uncontrollable young daughter Victoria Shalet. Gimmick is that Sheen hires a whole squad of real domestics to do all the work for him.
Though he has a local caterer do the key preparations, Sheen has to buckle down and serve food when Bisset throws a dinner party. He handles the inevitable slapstick with aplomb when the banker (Jean-Pierre Cassel) who hired him shows up and he must avoid his gaze to maintain his cover.
The stars handle this souffle of a feature with ease and young Shalet, with British accent is an attractive tyke. Not much is made of the 180-degree turnabout in casting of Sheen from his "Wall Street" role. Climax is a rather uninspired riff on "Working Girl".
Tech credits are okay for this genre, which resembles tv production more than theatrical filmmaking.
