Bernie (1996)

Bernie is a French comedy horror film first released in 1996, directed by Albert Dupontel.  The film stars Claude Perron, Albert Dupontel, Roland Blanche and Hélène Vincent.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


Bernie has spent his entire life in an orphanage.  He has no family, no knowledge of his origins, but, aged 30, he is determined to find out where he comes from.  With the savings he has accumulated during his time in the orphanage, he takes an apartment in Paris and begins his quest in earnest.  He starts by raiding the offices of the social security so that he can lay his hands on his personal file.  He discovers that, at the age of two weeks, he was found abandoned in a rubbish bin.  Unable to believe that his parents could do this to him, Bernie concocts a theory that he was abducted by gangsters shortly after he was born.  He is now more than ever determined to find his mother and father, knowing that they will be overjoyed to see him again after all these years...

As film censorship rules were relaxed in the late 1980s, early 1990s, cinema audiences would soon become accustomed to displays of graphic violence that would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier.  American cinema was first off the mark with a series of increasingly horrific slasher movies, but Europe was not far behind.  Benoît Poelvoorde’s C’est arrivé près de chez vous (1992) offered an orgy of mindless death and destruction that still continues to shock, even though the film was intended as a black comedy, an attempt to satirise society’s increasing appetite for ultra-violence in its entertainment.   Albert Dupontel’s Bernie follows in a similar comedic vein but, with its grisly spectacle of mayhem, mutilation and massacre, offers few easy laughs and is a profoundly disturbing film.  

This was Dupontel’s first full-length film as a director.  He had by this stage established himself as an actor, with several impressive film credits already under his belt, and he had also made one short film.  Bernie is clearly not a cheap shocker but a well-meant attempt to portray the failings of society – the breakdown of family life, the commercialisation of human relationships, the banality of violence, the impotence of the police, etc. – but it appears so caught up in itself that it feels like a self-indulgent orgy of artistic excess.  There are a few touches of brilliance but cinematographic technique and simulated violence are carried to absurd extremes whilst the characters are poorly developed and lacking in credibility, despite some very commendable performances.  The film succeeds in drawing our attention to the failings of the world around us but offers very little hope for the future.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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