If there was an MVP at the most recent Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, it was actor Fabrice Luchini, one of today’s most ubiquitous and remarkably proficient screen presences. He has already proven to be a deft master of comedy, drama, and even tragedy in a three-decade career of films by the likes of Eric Rohmer, Anne Fontaine, and Cédric Klapisch. In his two Rendez-Vous films, he was asked to carry considerable comic loads.

In François Ozon’s ’70s pastiche Potiche, he stole every scene from the likes of Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu. And in The Women on the 6th Floor, a frivolous, far-fetched farce from Philippe Le Guay, he makes us believe that a respectable middle-aged stockbroker would fall head over heels for a lovely young Spanish maid (the delectable Natalia Verbeke) right under the not-so-watchful eye of his preoccupied wife (a pitch-perfect Sandrine Kiberlain).

Set in early 1960s Paris, the movie centers around Jean-Louis Joubert, a stuffed-shirt who loses his longtime housekeeper after she mouths off one too many times about his high-strung wife, Suzanne, whom the woman blames for the death of Jean-Louis’ beloved mother. After being told by friends that Spanish maids are all the rage (“French maids won’t work Sundays”), Suzanne hires María, a young woman just arrived from Spain. She’s also the niece of one of the building’s veteran maids (an ageless Carmen Maura).

María, of course, turns out to be the perfect fit, even boiling finicky Jean-Louis’ eggs exactly as he wants them. Soon the boss eventually falls in love with his perky servant, but since this is a French comedy, there’s a bit more: Jean-Louis’ consciousness is raised by his close proximity to all the struggling Spanish maids, who live in cramped quarters on the sixth floor of his building. He not only gets involved in their personal lives (calling a plumber to fix their communal toilet, allowing one of the maids to use his phone to call Spain) but he also has his eyes open as to why these women are in Paris working long hours for low pay: to escape Franco’s fascist government back home.

While Jean-Louis is busy becoming a more better—i.e., more liberal—man thanks to the Spanish maids, his wife initially assumes that his new strange behavior means he’s having an affair with an attractive middle-aged client she’s jealous of. Director Le Guay doesn’t miss any opportunity for a shop-worn visual or plot point, so Jean-Louis’ dull days serving rich, conservative clients are juxtaposed with the maids’ buoyantly optimistic attitudes while working, eating, praying, or relaxing on their days off. (Even Suzanne is moved to say, somewhat redundantly, “The women up there are alive, but down here we’re dead.”)

After Suzanne throws him out, he moves into a spare room on the same floor as the women (he’s ecstatic that he has his own room for the first time since he was a child), rolls up his sleeves, and begins hanging out with the maids. He eats Spanish food with them, sings Spanish songs with them, and even drives them to Lisieux to pray at St. Therese’s shrine. Also, after discovering that they are ignorantly keeping their savings in their rooms, he explains how the stock market works and how it’s best that they invest their money with him (ah, such carefree days!).

If the comedy goes down more smoothly and cheerfully than it should, it’s primarily due to Luchini, who has great chemistry with his two leading ladies. Kiberlain plays Suzanne as the perfect neurotic foil, while the Argentine-born Verbeke, a bright screen presence as María, deserves even more substantial roles. Luchini smartly avoids the trap of hamming it up in order to sell his director’s gimmicky premise. Just the opposite, actually; the actor stays as cool as a cucumber, making Jean-Louis’ transformation gradual and believable, rather than going the easier route of ramming it down our throats with excessive leering and lip smacking. Even his crooked, vaguely embarrassed smile is endearing.

Although asked to do foolish things both comic and melodramatic—like selling an implausibly happy ending that’s one romantic fantasy too many—Luchini never falters, with the result that The Women on the 6th Floor is far more amusing (and romantic) than it has any right to be.