L’Associé (1979) - film review

When Julien Pardot loses his well-paid job in advertising he is at a loss over what to do next.  With a wife and young child to support, he must find work quickly and so he decides to set himself up as a financial adviser.  He anticipates that a friend will lend him a helping hand in winning his first client, but it is not to be.  His friend would like to help, but his associate has other ideas.  This gives Julien the idea of inventing his own business partner, Walter C. Davis.  The scam works better than Julien could ever have imagined and he soon finds himself inundated with wealthy clients wanting him to manage their investments.   But as his company grows from strength to strength, Julien realises that it his non-existent associate who is taking all of the credit for his success.  Even his wife and son have come to idolise Mr Davis and suspect that Julien is a freeloader.  Driven almost insane by Davis’s popularity, Julien decides that he must die.  But how do you kill a man who does not exist...?

L’Associé is one of a number of caustic anti-capitalist satires made in France in the late 1970s, a period of great economic turbulence, which appear to be highly relevant for our own troubled times, three decades on.  Along with Jacques Rouffio’s Le Sucre (1978) and Christian de Chalonge’s L’Argent des autres (1978), the film shows us both the absurdity and fragility of the financial system on which our seemingly well-ordered society is built.   Today, these films have an uncanny prescience, since recent events have borne out their apocalyptic message, that the entire financial system on which we all depend is no more than a house of cards, one that may be toppled at any moment by the merest disapproving tut of a speculating grannie.

With a screenplay by award-winning writer Jean-Claude Carrière, one-time frequent collaborator with Luis Buñuel, L’Associé is an intelligent and witty comedy that could have been a classic if the direction and casting had been a little more adventurous.  Michel Serrault does an excellent job as the main protagonist, a kind of Gallic Reggie Perrin who seems cursed to succeed as a money-spinning cog in the capitalist system.  Serrault is at his funniest when he is playing black comedy and the film offers a few amusing digressions in this vein.  Most memorable is the scene in which his character attempts to buy a human skeleton in a shop that – er – specialises in selling human skeletons (presumably there is more demand for such things in France than in other countries).  Alas, Serrault’s talents are not matched by his supporting cast and so this feels all too much like a one-man show.  L’Associé may not be a true classic but watching it today will most definitely send a cold shiver down your spine.

© James Travers 2010

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