Barnie et ses petites contrariétés (2001) - film review

Barnie is a conventional businessman, with a home in Calais and a job in London.  He has an adoring wife, a teenage daughter, a young mistress, Margot, and a gay lover, Mark.  Barnie’s love life is complicated but he manages to keep it together, until the day he receives the same birthday present from Margot, Mark and his daughter – a trip to Venice on the Orient Express.  Deciding to take his wife on the luxury train journey, he writes letters to Mark and Margot declining their offers, but these somehow get mixed up.  Offended, Mark and Margot set out for Barnie’s house in France to tell a few home truths.  They could not have chosen a worse time – Barnie is about to discover that his seemingly loyal wife Lucy has been having an affair with their daughter’s history teacher, Alexandre…

Mirth on the Orient Express?  It may not be the most original or intelligent of French comedies in recent years, but it’s hard to deny that Barnie et ses petites contrariétés is a very funny film, an exuberant bedroom farce which just about manages to avoid tipping over into crass silliness.  It’s a first full length film for Bruno Chiche, although he has made a number of short films over the past decade.  Chiche’s inexperience is apparent not just in the quality of the acting – which is wildly over-the-top in places – but also in the film’s uneven pace and tone.  Despite its obvious faults, this is a film that is genuinely entertaining and, in a few places, laugh-out-loud funny.  Whilst it’s a shame to see so many big name actors failing to live up to their reputation (Marie Gillain and Serge Hazanavicius are pretty well wasted in this film), it’s a treat to see Fabrice Luchini playing straight Mr Bean-style farce instead of the intellectual kind of comedy for which he is better known.  It’s not clever, it’s not particularly memorable, but it is a wonderfully diverting piece of fun.

© James Travers 2007

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