La Maison du bonheur (2006)

La Maison du bonheur is a French film comedy first released in 2006, directed by Dany Boon.  The film stars Dany Boon, Michèle Laroque, Daniel Prévost, Zinedine Soualem and Laurent Gamelon.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


Working for a credit agency, Charles Boulin has come to realise the value of money.  Unfortunately, neither his wife Anne nor his daughter appreciate his meticulous management of the household budget and to them he just a skinflint.  So, to prove them wrong, Charles decides to offer his wife the most extravagant present he can imagine - a large house with a garden, just fifteen minutes from the centre of Paris.  No sooner has he bought the house, paid for with a 25 year mortgage, he loses his job.  Worse, to make the house habitable, he has to spend all of his savings to have it repaired.  Luckily, Mr Draquart, the estate agent who sold him the house, knows a pair of competent, fast-working builders who will make the necessary repairs at a fair price.  Unluckily, Charles hasn’t yet realised that the words uttered by estate agents have only a tenuous relationship with the truth and his dream house soon begins to resemble a battle zone.   Unable to find work and with his debts spiralling out of control, Charles has no choice but to sell his apartment, hoping that his wife will not find out until the day of the move.  Once again, Mr Draquart is there to lend a helping hand, and make Charles’s misery well and truly complete...

There is an uncanny prescience about this seemingly inoccuous film comedy, released just one year before the global debt pyramid collapsed and made the word "banker" a socially unacceptable term of abuse.  La Maison du bonheur is far more relevant today (2009) than it was in 2006 and what may have been intended as a breezy farce is now more a black comedy with a razor-sharp satirical edge.  Although a little unevenly paced and somewhat prone to cliché, the film is an enjoyable romp that delivers plenty of laughs, highly topical with its salutary reminder of the dangers of taking on too much debt.  Maybe if a few more politicians had seen this film, we might all have been spared a great deal of pain...

The film marks an auspicious directing debut, that of Dany Boon, a popular celebrity in France, who has pursued a twin-track career as actor and singer, as famous for his one man shows and film appearances as for his crooning.  No one, not even Boon himself, could have foreseen the success his next directorial offering would achieve.  With an audience of over 20 million, Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis would be the most successful film made in France to date – a remarkable achievement for a director with just one previous film under his belt.

La Maison du bonheur originated from a 2003 stage play entitled La Vie de chantier which Dany Boon wrote and starred in.  Boon had difficulty convincing producer Claude Berri to provide the financial backing to make the film.   Berri originally turned the project down but subsequently changed his mind when he saw the play by chance and found it hilarious.   Impressed by Boon’s work, Berri had no qualms about backing his next film, which turned out to be the equivalent of buying the winning ticket in the national lottery in a rollover week. Here’s a director who is already proving to be a great boon for French cinema...

© James Travers 2009

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