Inspecteur la Bavure (1980) - film review

As a boy, Michel Clément, promised his dying father that he would follow in his footsteps and become a police inspector.  Twenty years on, Clément just manages to scrape through police school and lands a trainee place in Paris.  Clément’s lack of enthusiasm and talent for the job soon become apparent, but his mother forces him to stick at it.  Whilst his colleagues are busy tracking down a psychopathic crook, Roger Morzini, Clément is saddled with a journalist, Marie-Anne Prossant, as he occupies himself with routine tasks.  Posing as a writer, Morzini wins Clément’s confidence so that he can kidnap Marie-Anne, who has been taunting the crook in her TV interviews.   Realising how he has been duped, Clément makes a valiant attempt to redeem himself...

This respectable comedy policier from director Claude Zidi provides ample opportunity for the comic genius Coluche to show his talents as both an actor and a comedian.   Widely regarded as one of Coluche’s better films, it has both the gloss of an early 1980s French thriller and some raucous comedy, giving it great entertainment value.  The scene in which Coluche comes to grief with an inflatable dummy is the stuff of comedy legend – and this is just one of a number of brilliantly realised comic situations (although there are also a few which fall horribly flat).

Fans of Coluche will not be disappointed; if anything, his performance in this film serves only to increase our appreciation of his talents as a comedian – although him being dragged up to the eyebrows as a Parisian prostitute is perhaps one sight we should have been spared.  The film’s other stars – Gérard Depardieu and Dominique Lavanant are equally on fine form, both helping to transform what could easily have been a limp comedy into an enjoyable satirical romp, a much-needed antidote to formulaic French crime thriller of the late 1970s.

© James Travers 2003

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