From EW.com:

“This rapier-sharp comedy of social manners from French auteur Agnès Jaoui (The Taste of Others) stars Jaoui as an overbearing feminist writer angling for a political career. Jaoui’s longtime collaborator, Jean-Pierre Bacri, plays a self-aggrandizing documentarian eager to interview her at her childhood home. And with the always wonderful Jamel Debbouze (Days of Glory) as an aspiring filmmaker who’s the son of an Algerian housekeeper, Jaoui neatly, gently, firmly slips political commentary into Let It Rain’s articulate mayhem. She also teases tender humor out of sibling rivalry, church ritual, fussy parenting, and the conversational limitations of bachelor farmers. A”

From The New York Times:

You Have Issues? So Does Everybody

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: June 18, 2010

The personal is political in the films of Agnès Jaoui, a sort of Gallic Woody Allen whose comedies of manners reveal a sensibility acutely attuned to the tiniest nuances of the mind games people play. Ms. Jaoui’s films may lack Mr. Allen’s comic shtick, quotable one-liners and showy metaphysical angst, but they are precisely calibrated dissections of the pretensions and insecurities of the French chattering class. As critical as she can be of her characters, Ms. Jaoui portrays them with the evenhanded sympathy of a wise therapist who likes her clients despite their annoying foibles.

The low-level politicians and media types who inhabit “Let It Rain,” her third film as a director (she has acted in many others), are too busy pursuing their personal agendas to sit back and despair about the human condition. Almost all them feel victimized in one way or another. That includes the protagonist, Agathe Villanova, a self-confident feminist writer (played by Ms. Jaoui with just the right edge of impatience) making the leap into politics.

Bossy and free-spirited, Agathe, who resembles a more unguarded Katie Couric, can’t understand why her boyfriend, Antoine (Frédéric Pierrot), objects to her rules about their relationship; she won’t live with him and has no desire for children. As much as Antoine loves her, he feels like an afterthought tagging after her during the campaign. As she discovers upon entering the fray, arguing politics with friends in Paris is no preparation for the rough and tumble of the real thing.

Agathe is at discreet loggerheads with her younger sister, Florence (Pascale Arbillot), who lives in the house, three hours outside of Paris, in which they grew up. Florence, who lacks Agathe’s self-esteem, is saddled with a clinging husband, Stéphane (Guillaume de Tonquedec). The sisters’ mother having recently died, Agathe returns to help settle the estate while campaigning for local office. Amid emotional tension exacerbated by Florence’s resentment of Agathe for being their mother’s favorite, their loyal Algerian housekeeper, Mimouna (Mimouna Hadji), is a calm voice of certainty. A believer in traditional family values, she looks askance at Agathe’s highhanded independence.

Once Agathe returns, Mimouna’s son, Karim (Jamel Debbouze), an aspiring documentarian who works as a hotel desk clerk, proposes making a television documentary about Agathe with his underemployed former mentor, Michel (Jean-Pierre Bacri, who wrote the screenplay with Ms. Jaoui). Agathe agrees, and the project becomes a comedy of errors in which the weather (it is always raining) plays a critical role.

Karim believes he has been looked down upon all his life for his ethnicity, and seethes with ambition and resentment. Michel, who is divorced with a young son, also feels discriminated against because his wife has custody of the boy. While interviewing Agathe, one of his first questions is why women usually get custody in divorce cases. As Michel repeatedly demonstrates his incompetence, Agathe is a surprisingly good sport until she becomes so angry she can barely speak.

“Let It Rain” is of a piece with Ms. Jaoui’s earlier films, “The Taste of Others” and “Look at Me,” whose minutely observed characters tend to be thin-skinned, competitive egotists invested in their status in the world of ideas. The movie captures the tone of urbane discourse with an astonishing awareness of the subtexts of every nervous remark.

If there is an overriding political sensibility in her films, it is an enlightened feminism that recognizes male vulnerability under a facade of braggadocio and forgives men their flaws.

Late in the movie Agathe, Michel and Karim, whose project is stalled, are rescued from their disabled car and a downpour by a couple of farmers, one of whom can’t stop staring hungrily at Agathe. They have their own tale of victimization by a government that subsidizes big agriculture while overlooking small farms. You realize these peasants, who actually produce things, have a legitimate gripe, in contrast with the psychological baggage weighing down their spoiled, more well-heeled guests.

Among the characters “Let It Rain” is the hardest on poor Michel, a “professional” documentarian, at least in his own mind, who dissembles when flaunting his connections and his résumé. While at work, he is so crippled by anxiety that he sabotages himself at every turn. On top of everything he is carrying on an affair with Florence.

That affair is one of the film’s two extraneous subplots. In the other, Karim, who is married, flirts with an attractive headstrong co-worker, Aurelie (Florence Loiret-Caille), who is ready to jump into a relationship.

Some have complained about the dearth of high drama in Ms. Jaoui’s films. But I think its absence makes them all the more authentic. Needlessly complicated, life already has more than enough petty dramas. “Let It Rain” may not be funny in a ha-ha sense, but it gave me an amused open-mouthed appreciation of life’s absurdities, including unanticipated nuisances like bad weather.