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Admitting you don't have any friends is kind of like admitting you spend your weekends clubbing seals to death for a laugh – that is, there's got to be something wrong with you or something lacking in your life. Or as taxidriver Bruno (Boon) puts it in less PETA-antagonising terms, if you don't have anyone to call at 3 o'clock in the morning, you've got problems.

The man with the problems in Patrice Leconte's comedy drama Mon Meilleur Ami is François (Auteil, Hidden), a man who, ironically, seems to have everything else. A debonair art dealer with a quintessentially Gallic lifestyle – a fabulous apartment, a taste for wine and fine living, a casual lover – he's somewhat taken aback to discover at his own birthday party that he has no friends. In fact, the general consensus is that he's seen as a smug little shit.

As if this revelation weren't enough, business partner Catherine (Gayet) publicly bets him that he can't produce his best friend by the end of the month. Suddenly, his lack of an intimate confidante seems writ large in everything he does and everywhere he goes.

Spurred on by the shame of being a metaphorical seal-beater, François plumbs the depths of self-help seminars and 'How to Make Friends and Influence People'. He fixates on the idea that if he can't buy friendship that he can learn how to make people like him. And, after a series of chance encounters with trivia-fiend Bruno, he becomes convinced that this is the man who can teach him.

It's not long before both men are drawn into a strangely mismatched friendship, but the convenience of using his new-found friend to win the bet soon becomes an easy temptation for a man so used to using people as a means to an end…

Olivier Dazat's story idea has parallels with the Scrooge metamorphosis, with François having a series of revelations at the hands of the ghosts of acquaintances past, present and future that he has used people like the commodities he buys and sells every day. And now he faces the prospect of not even having any one to mourn him at his funeral. Then again, as idiot-savant Bruno philosophizes, what good is having your friends around you only when it's too late to enjoy them?

Leconte draws a rather heavy-handed demarcation between François and Bruno, emphasizing on the one hand how utterly incompatible they appear to be; on the other underlying the way in which friendships, love and intimacy can 'complete' the self. Of course the danger in this is that the protagonists are rendered in somewhat clichéd terms. Bruno's childlike honesty and interaction, for instance: he is the typical, likeable loser, a man with a heart of hold and several eccentricities – a male counterpart to Amelie, perhaps.

Rather like that film, and despite the narrative weaknesses of the final act, Mon Meilleur Ami is heavy on the charm despite the sombre underlying exploration of the pains and pleasures of fragmented life, mixing comedy, drama and pathos in equal measure.

Jerôme Tonnet's screenplay and Leconte's direction are particularly effective in highlighting the 'near-misses' of François' solitary life; in his not realising that all along he has had friendships, albeit unrequited ones, particularly with the women in his life, and to whom François is particularly blind.

Mon Meilleur Ami is a wry-smiler of a film and, despite it's lightweight 90-minute runtime, not just disposable viewing. Whether you come away smiling or grimacing may ultimately depend on whether you yourself have anyone to call at 3 o'clock in the morning.