Akoibon (2005)

Akoibon is a French comedy thriller film first released in 2005, directed by Edouard Baer.  The film stars Jean Rochefort, Nader Boussandel, Marie Denarnaud, Edouard Baer and Chiara Mastroianni.  Our overall rating for this film is: mediocre.


To save his friend from being dismembered piece by piece, small-time con artist Nader must travel to a remote holiday island and deliver Chris Barnes, a faded celebrity, into the hands of a mysterious (and totally ruthless) boss.   Once a darling of the jet set, Chris Barnes has been reduced to running a holiday camp for masochists, where guests have their evenings ruined by an excruciatingly bad cabaret act and their nights disturbed by military manoeuvres.  When he arrives on the island, Nader meets Daniel, who has just left his wife and children in the hope of starting an affair with a girl he met on the Internet.  The two men decide to swap their identities...

The only thing remotely clever about this self-indulgent mess of a comedy (or should that be meta-mess of a meta-comedy) is its title.  A quoi bon?  That’s the question you end up asking yourself after watching it, assuming you are French and had a good upbringing.   Edouard Baer’s second film - after the equally unimpressive La Bostella (2000) - has the look and feel of a private joke, conceived purely with the intention of amusing the cast and crew and carried to extraordinary lengths.   Surely, if a director can attract such über-talented performers as Jean Rochefort, Benoît Poelvoorde and Jeanne Moreau, you would think he would be able to find something sensible for them to do, instead of getting them to look like refugees from a third rate vaudeville act. 

Akoibon is an attempt at a meta-film which amply demonstrates why the meta-film idea hasn’t really caught on.   Breaking the fourth wall in a film is a bit like demolishing an interior wall in your house.  Get it right - as Wes Craven did in his New Nightmare (1994) - and the result can be highly impressive.  Get it wrong, which is the more probable outcome, and you will end up being buried alive in one spectacular self-referential avalanche.   Akoibon is what happens when it goes wrong - the (meta-)film equivalent of a DIY disaster.

It’s a shame that Edouard Baer’s natural flair for comedy is not matched by the discipline required to make a film that is worth watching.  Akoibon is irresistibly funny in places (how could it be otherwise with Benoît Poelvoorde in the frame?) but it just doesn’t hold together as a film.  Indeed, it is so lacking in structure and focus that it totters about like a three-legged brontosaurus struggling to find its way back home after a New Year’s Eve party before collapsing under the weight of its own self-conscious silliness.  Here’s a film that is so far up its own (meta-)hindquarters that you wonder why it doesn’t just fall in on itself and form a miniature blackhole that devours the lot of us.  The next time Baer and company knock down the fourth wall, they should really put up a few hazard signs.

© James Travers 2010

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