Erreur de la banque en votre faveur (2009) - film review

For the past 17 years, Julien Foucault has been a model employee for the bank Berthin-Schwartz.  He is sure that the bank will lend him the money he needs to open a restaurant with his friend Étienne.  When he is turned down, Julien finds another way to raise the necessary capital.  By eavesdropping on his employers, he picks up snippets of information in the corporate world which allow him to make a quick profit by buying and selling shares.  Lured by the prospect of easy money, Étienne allows Julien to invest all of his money in this way.  As Julien’s luck holds, it appears that his dream will soon be a reality.  But then his employers uncover his little game and decide to have some fun at his expense...

Gérard Bitton and Michel Munz, the writing team that brought us such popular comedies as La Vérité si je mens (1997) and its hit sequel, continue their assault on society’s unhealthy obsession with money in this highly entertaining social comedy.  A decade ago, Bitton and Munz were almost a voice in the wilderness, bemoaning the malign influence of money on relationships and societal cohesion.  Today, as we try to pick up the pieces after the worst financial crisis in living memory, they appear to have been vindicated lock, stock and smoking barrel.   Their latest film, Erreur de la banque en votre faveur, is highly topical and provides a very timely satire on the kind of blinkered money-obsessed madness which led inexorably to the credit crunch and its dismal aftermath.    

The film is a considerable improvement on Bitton and Munz’s previous film, the execrably bad Le Cactus (2005), although it is still just as prone to the worst excesses of caricature.  On this occasion, however, the clichés are well-juggled and used to great comic effect and, overall, the film is Bitton and Munz’s best collaborative venture since the magnificent La Vérité si je mens! 2 (2001).  The film is particularly well-cast, with an ensemble of talent that gets the absolute best from Bitton and Munz’s gag-packed script.  Gérard Lanvin, a supremely classy actor, anchors the film in reality whilst also serving as the catalyst for some of the film’s funniest situations.  His is the only character to escape outright caricature.  By contrast, Scali Delpeyrat and Martin Lamotte teeter on the brink of pure vaudeville, playing respectively the greedy bank employee and money-obsessed surgeon - they provide the easiest laughs but look as if they have fallen out of the pages of a comic-book.  

Where the film is perhaps less successful is in its secondary story strand in which Jean-Pierre Darroussin falls under the spell of a student who is young enough to be his daughter.  Here the situations and gags are well-past their sell-by date, but a sympathetic performance from Darroussin just about keeps things on track.  Whilst its ending is a little too contrived and tooth-grindingly upbeat to be a completely satisfactory resolution to a Julien’s speculative adventure, Erreur de la banque en votre faveur does deliver a cogent moral on the dangerously corrosive effect of money on our society.  The progeny of greed is never happiness but merely further greed, a beast that can never be sated.  Bitton and Munz’s latest comedy has a bitter truth to it which may have been present in their previous films but we were probably too busy riding the tide of ever-increasing prosperity to notice.

© James Travers 2011

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