Carambolages (1963) - film review

A lowly groundfloor employee in a company specialising in leisure activities, Paul Martin is ambitious, and with good reason.   His impending marriage to his fiancée Danielle and the fact that he has put his secretary Solange in the family way look set to place great demands on his wallet, so to pay his way he desperately needs a promotion.  Fortunately, Danielle is the daughter of his head of department, Brossard, and so Martin expects he will have his position when Brossard retires.  But when Martin learns that Brossard’s departure is to be delayed, he decides he can wait no longer and makes a crucial decision.  To advance his career he must kill his superiors, starting with the company’s chief executive Norbert Charolais...
© Willems Henri (Brussels, Belgium)

Carambolages is that rarest of things in French cinema - an effective mix of black comedy and vaudevillian farce garnished in a sour sprinkling of social satire.  Is the film casting its net a little too widely in an attempt to get its laughs?  Perhaps, but the scattergun comedy seems to work, thanks mainly to the inspired face-à-face of comic genius Louis de Funès and Jean-Claude Brialy, the then darling of the French New Wave trying (a little too) hard to make a name for himself in mainstream cinema.   The plot manages to be both chaotic and predictable, a tale of career advancement that owes something to the Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), but the humour is unflagging - it is worth watching the film just to see Brialy manically chasing after an implausibly agile frog.

When he made this film, Louis de Funès was far from being the national treasure that he was destined to become after his meteoritic elevation to stardom through the films Le Gendarme de St. Tropez (1964) and Fantômas (1964).  This was one of his pre-break-through triumphs, in which he perfected the persona for which he is now best known, the mean-spirited executive who ill-treats everyone around him (think of him as a mix of Alan Sugar and Caligula) and yet who somehow manages to retain our sympathy as the world conspires to give him his just deserts.   The De Funès we see in Carambolages is the one that French audience would later flock in their millions to watch in such films as Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob (1973) and L’Aile ou la cuisse (1976) - a supremely talented comic performer at the height of his game.

The nominal star of the film is not De Funès, however, but Jean-Claude Brialy, one of the bright young things who was most associated with La Nouvelle Vague through his appearances in films ranging from Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge (1958) to Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme est une femme (1961), via a cameo role in Truffaut’s Les 400 coups (1959).  Brialy didn’t quite have the mainstream appeal of other stars of the era, notably Alain Delon (who makes a brief but magnificent appearance at the end of this film), and he seems curiously out of place in frivolities of this kind.  Nevertheless, his natural flair for comedy sees him through and, with the collusion of screenwriter Michel Audiard, he turns in one of his most entertaining performances, and also one of his most chilling.  As he ascends the greasy pole, resorting to every drastic means to achieve his ambitions, Brialy displays sociopathic tendencies that would make even Delon’s Tom Ripley blush.  Some fine supporting contributions from Michel Serrault and Sophie Daumier (a dead-ringer for Bardot) keep the comedy express chugging along nicely, and whilst the film doesn’t come anywhere near to achieving its full comic potential, it is an enjoyable romp - even if most of the gags revolve around people falling from great heights to their deaths or else being blown up with homemade incendiary devices.  Fortunately, the cute little amphibians manage to get through this one relatively unscathed.

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