Hommes, femmes, mode d’emploi (1996) - film review

Fabio Lino is an ex-actor who finds he can put his acting skills to better use in his current job as a policeman.  Benoit Blanc is a successful business man who has more than an eye for the ladies.  Both men meet up after a visit to their doctor and find they have the same  health problem.  Their doctor turns out to be one of Benoit’s earlier conquests, many years ago when she was a very young woman.  Determined to get some revenge on her ex-lover, the young doctor swaps the results of her two patients’ examinations.  She informs Fabio that he is fit and well and Benoit that he has only a very small chance of survival.  The news radically affects the lives and fortunes of both men...

One has to admire Lelouch’s audacity!  When the film was made, its co-star, Bernard Tapie, was at the heart of a storm of contraversy in France.  The former head of Marseilles soccer team and previously holding a French government post, Tapie was rarely out of the limelight in the French media in the early and mid 1990s.  Shortly after the film was released he was tried for financial irregularities and sent to prison.  That Lelouch should brave the storm and cast his old friend in his film is testamant to the director’s courage or obstinacy!  And what a remarkable piece of casting it is.  I cannot think of any actor who could have carried off the part half as well as Tapie, and the recent history of the man adds more than a tinge of spice and colour to the character.

The film’s other star, Fabrice Luchini, is on fine form too.  The cultivated, slightly edgy, comedy actor is a perfect foil for Tapie’s down-to-earth worldly confidence.  The scenes where the two men are discussing philosophy, with Luchini become increasingly amazed at Tapie’s apparent profundity, are deliciously funny.

One possible fault of the film is that, in order to justify its title, its scope was widened a bit too much.  If it had focused on the lives of the two main protagonists, the policeman and the business man, the film would perhaps have had greater cohesion, and would probably have been more successful.  Unfortunately, the main plot drags in other elements, such as the street singer who ends up as a concert performer, and the silly, but fun, sub-plot where a teenage boy and girl meet on a train, lose contact, and then go to extraordinary lengths to find each other again.   As a result, the film ia little over-long and the sophistication of the Tapie-Luchini comedy is watered down by the comic-book escapades which happen in the various sub-plots.

© James Travers 2003

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