La Vie dissolue de Gérard Floque (1987) - film review

On the day he loses his job with an advertising agency, Gérard Floque returns home to find that his infant daughter has been arrested for drugs trafficking and that his wife is having a raunchy affair with a TV presenter.  Gérard’s only comfort in this time of mid-life crisis is his colleague, a young punk girl named Martine.  She allows him to move into her apartment, which she shares with a lesbian girlfriend.  It’s the beginning of a whole new way of life...

Although he is best known for his slick crime-thrillers (featuring such iconic actors as Alain Delon, Jean Gabin and Jean-Paul Belmondo), director Georges Lautner also had a hand in some of France’s most successful film comedies, notably the 1963 classic Les Tontons flingueurs.  La Vie dissolue de Gérard Floque is one of Lautner’s later comic films, an obvious imitation of the uninhibited "café-théâtre" style of comedy that was hugely popular in the 1980s, as a result of the success of such films as Patrice Leconte’s Les Bronzés (1978).

La Vie dissolue de Gérard Floque has the cast line-up that seems to have been calculated to make the film appeal to as many people as possible.  First, there are representatives from the café-théâtre school of comedy: Roland Giraud, Marie-Anne Chazel and Christian Clavier.  Next there is Gérard Rinaldi, one of the famous Charlots, a comedy group that was huge in France in the 1970s.  Then there are two long-standing comic performers, Jacqueline Maillan and Michel Galabru, who are every bit as funny as their younger fellow artistes.

With so much high-grade comedy talent flying around, it’s easy to overlook the film’s biggest fault – that it has virtually nothing in the way of a plot.  Indeed, the film looks more like a succession of cobbled together sketches than something with a coherent narrative.  Still, the performances are great and the jokes, especially the visual gags, are irresistibly funny, so who’s complaining?

© James Travers 2007

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