L’Aventure, c’est l’aventure (1972)

L’Aventure, c’est l’aventure is a French comedy thriller film first released in 1972, directed by Claude Lelouch.  The film stars Lino Ventura, Jacques Brel, Charles Denner, Johnny Hallyday and Charles Gérard.  It has also been released under the title: Money Money Money.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


Realising that times have changed, five unscrupulous crooks decide it is time for a reappraisal of their line of business.  Prostitutes are demanding the right to strike, workers now dismiss their bosses rather than the other way round, and the world is being refashioned by political and social revolutions.  For Lino, Jacques, Simon, Charlot and Aldo, the days of robbing banks are a thing of the past.  Now they decide to make an active participation in this brave new world, by hijacking aeroplanes and kidnapping high-profile public figures, starting with the rock singer Johnny Halliday.  It proves to be a very lucrative enterprise, until one of their victims turns the tables on them...

Although intended as an off-the-wall comedy, L’Aventure, c’est l’aventure does offer a pretty accurate reflection of the kind of political upheavals which were taking place in France when it was being made.  The aftershocks of May ’68 were still shaping public attitudes, with power gradually shifting away from the political and managerial elite into the hands of ordinary men and women.   Naturally, some unscrupulous individuals were not slow to capitalise on such developments to further their own ends, and L’Aventure, c’est l’aventure can be seen as a timely satire on such cynical exploitation of populist ideals.   It is also an enormously funny film – possibly Lelouch’s best comic film – and, apart from a few rather tedious sequences, it makes for a near-faultless piece of entertainment.  Extraordinary to think that when the film was first released it was shot to pieces by the critics.

What makes the film so enjoyable and memorable is the constant sparring between the five principal characters as they fumble their way through a series of improbable criminal exploits.  Like a pack of juvenile delinquents, they manage to persuade themselves of their infallibility, in spite of the fact that they are getting increasingly out of their depth.  The five actors who play this unlikely band of politically opportunistic crooks make an impressive quintet, headed by the indispensible Lino Ventura (who is renowned for playing tough gangster leads).  Popular Belgian singer Jacques Brel took the part which Lelouch had originally offered to Jean-Louis Trintignant when the latter opted out of the project.  Among the film’s many rib-tickling sequences, the best is probably the scene where the five crooks end up being tortured (by a bizarre  caricature of a South American revolutionary) to reveal the number of their Swiss bank account.  It is scenes such as this which have made L’Aventure, c’est l’aventure an enduring film and, in the eyes of some, a cult classic.

© James Travers 2003

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