a typical farce from Michel Audiard, French screenwriter and director, the French Preston Sturges in a way. a bunch of oddballs, living in a shanty town in Paris outskirts, liquidate visitors and foreigners thru a special machine. the cast is a collection of famous French actors. michel Audiard put no boundaries to his imagination in this post1968 movie, conceived as a ludicrous comedy for oddball actors. The wittiness of the lines of michel audiard are,as always,sheer delight and hilarity in the voice of bernard blier. all the fun comes from those pungent and witty lines, which does not really make up the thin plot and low budget.
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kastagne2 January 2005
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jean-no17 May 2003a such movie belongs to a genre that is not registred by the internet movie database, and this genre is called "franchouillard" : sometimes good actors, a few good lines, perhaps one ore two ideas, not more. The directing is not very good, the script either, the editing is a disaster and all seams very cheap (we have here even some special effects... Let's just warn : this is not Matrix). -- The storyline is awfull : living in a "ghetto" near Paris, a dame called "the princess" uses to kill people and to put them in a machine that plays some Samba music while it puts appart clothes, flesh, bones... bweuarkfff. Bad taste, hum. The princess sells her bones to the catholic church who uses it as relics. One day, a high-range ecclesiastic asks the murderer to come back with a relic of Jesus. With her gang, she looks for somebody that looks like Jesus. One day, a hippie comes in the camp, he looks like Jesus, and that's not all, he seems to be Jesus for real... -- Michel Audiard did the dialogs of brilliant movies from George Lautner : "Les Barbouzes", "Les Tontons flingueurs", "Ne nous fâchons pas". Alone as a director, he has not always been brilliant : this movie, actually, is not a very good one, even if the cast is quite funny (Darry Cowl, Bernard Blier, André Pousse, Michel Galabru,...). Better to see "Comment réussir... quand on est con et pleurnichard" (How to Make Good When One Is a Jerk and a Crybaby), Audiard's masterpiece I guess.
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In a Parisian ghetto live all kinds of weird characters. There's one even more outrageous than all the others: a woman named Rosemonde du Bois de la Faisanderie. She has the nasty habit to kill people and put them in a machine. This machine makes the sound of Brazilian samba music when it's working. The police try to catch her but they fail every time as she outsmarts them with her charm.
It's a pity when you see all this effort done by the actors (for example the bit when Annie Girardot plays piano and Bernard Blier plays harp), trying hard to make it funny, and to experience that the comedy doesn't work. It isn't the hilarious black comedy it could be. The film looks more like a satire without a subject. It has some references to authority, religion, social differences, and yet they all remain trivial.
I always try to support the underdogs of cinema, like this film. And I guess the fun part lies in the strange characters in this ghetto. In that way it reminded me a bit of the film Micmacs. But it still is painfully unfunny most of the time. What remains is a film for the fans of Annie Girardot as there a lot of scenes in which she's pulling her typical Girardot faces. Michel Audiard also directed the reasonable predecessor of this film (Elle boit pas, elle fume pas ), but this one just doesn't work for me. Only to watch out of curiosity for the cult murder machine playing samba music, otherwise a forgettable flick. -
Kirpianuscus18 June 2023Absurd, charming, example of dark humor and irony against Christianism and the crazy script by Michel Audiard.
In short, a French farce defined by actors presence because the feeling to discover, scene by scene, a game of children becomes more powerful.
No doubts, Annie Girardot remains the main motif to see this film inspiring more nostalgia then smiles.
Portrait of hippy period, some slices of horror in a sort of parody, a bishop in very sarcastique portrait and some romance in final.
Exactly the innocent play with taboos is the source of interest about a film who seems bizzarre more today than in its time.