La Moutarde me monte au nez (1974) - film review

Pierre Durois, a maths teacher in a girls’ school, has a talent for writing which others are keen to exploit.  His father, Hubert Durois, a notable surgeon and aspiring mayor, depends on him to write speeches for the forthcoming electoral campaign.  Simultaneously, Pierre must do corrections for an absent colleague and edit a report by a journalist friend.  When the three documents get mixed up, Pierre does his best to return them to their rightful owners, but after a bizarre sequence of events, he ends up in the bedroom of film star Jacky Logan.  When Pierre recounts his extraordinary night with the reclusive celebrity to a newspaper editor – who just happens to be his father’s rival in the mayoral election – his problems really begin.  Jacky reposts by declaring that she and Pierre intend to get married – putting his father’s dazzling political career in immediate jeopardy…

Pierre Richard teams up with Jane Birkin in this rip-roaring comedy, a laugh-a-minute farce which is filled with gloriously over-the-top comic situations.  It’s pure madness from start to finish, and whilst the comedy does flag in a few places (as the plot struggles bravely to keep up), somehow the jokes manage to keep coming.  As ever, Pierre Richard, that unsurpassed clown of film comedy, is irresistibly funny as director Claude Zidi steers him through some of his most hilarious (and humiliating) comic routines.  Actor Claude Piéplu also gets one of his best screen moments in the scene where he portrays a surgeon applying his own peculiar idea of stress management – whilst operating on an unsuspecting patient.

© James Travers 2004

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