L’Auberge rouge (2007) - film review

In the late 1800s, Martin and Rose manage a remote inn in the Pyrenean mountains.  Unable to make enough money from their honest trade, the couple allow their adopted son Violet to murder their customers so that they can purloin their belongings.  One stormy evening, a stagecoach shows up at the inn and its passengers decide to spend the night there, to the obvious delight of Martin and Rose.  This could be a bountiful evening, they decide.  Unfortunately, one of the new arrivals is a priest, Carnus, and Rose cannot help confessing her past crimes to him.  How can Carnus warn his fellow travelling companions that they are all in mortal danger without breaching the confidence of a confession...?

Claude Autant-Lara’s 1951 film L’Auberge rouge is a classic of French cinema, a black comedic masterpiece which only the bravest or most foolhardy of souls would attempt to remake.  It’s hard to say whether Gérard Krawczyk is brave or foolhardy but the one thing that can be said with certainty is that his remake of Autant-Lara’s film is irredeemably dire.  Even if there weren’t a film to directly compare it with, it would still be obvious to just about anyone that this overblown spectacle of vulgarity and tacky juvenile humour is a travesty.  And to think that Krawczyk had a budget of 20 million euros at his disposal.  To borrow a turn of phrase from Winston Churchill, never in the field of cinematic endeavour has so much money been wasted by so few to produce something so utterly puerile.  If you can spot three decent gags in this self-absorbed pile of crud, you should count yourself lucky (and then book an appointment with your optician).

Judging by the abundance of supposed jokes relating to bodily functions, the intention presumably was to bring Autant-Lara’s film up-to-date, by throwing in three members of the team that brought us such comedy classics as Les Bronzés (1978) and Le Père Noël est une ordure (1982)  - Christian Clavier, Josiane Balasko and Gérard Jugnot.   Unfortunately, the participants in this happy little reunion look as if they have been issued with fatwas threatening slow bodily dismemberment if they so much as make anyone in the audience smile - what other explanation could there be for none of them being remotely funny?  If there had been far less money to throw around, and if Krawczyk had had more confidence in his actors to carry the film instead of relying on fancy camerawork and distracting effects, and if the screenwriters hadn’t thrown out Bost and Aurenche’s best lines and replaced them with offensive drivel, the film might have worked.  Unfortunately, there appears to have been a severe case of comedy bypass here and nothing, absolutely nothing, about this film is remotely amusing - apart from the fact that it dares to call itself a comedy.  That Autant-Lara’s film is still hysterically funny, and funnier than virtually every mainstream French film made in the last decade, tells us a great deal.  We can expect more remakes like this - and we should avoid them like the plague.

© Simon Whitaker 2010

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