La Vengeance d’une blonde (1994) - film review

Gérard Bréha, a presenter on a local news programme, is offered a job with the prestigious cable channel, TV8, presenting the late news bulletin. When the presenter of the main evening news breaks his leg, Gérard replaces him, and the ratings for TV8 show a sudden and spectacular rise. Gérard and the ruthless executive who recruited him, Marie-Ange de la Baume, are determined to build on their success, even if it means disrupting Gérard’s family life.  To that end, they launch their own inquiry into the mysterious YAM terrorist group, who are raiding gun shops in Paris.  Suspecting that Gérard is having an affair with Marie-Ange, his wife decides to get her own back when they are both invited to appear on a confessions programme, Franc-Jeu...

La Vengeance d’une blonde combines two potentially promising themes, marital infidelity and a scathing satire of the television business, the result being a fairly entertaining, but not brilliant, comic farce.  The marital infidelity idea, which is ostensibly the film’s main story strand seems to go nowhere, and it is the outrageous send up of contemporary French television which offers all the laughs.

With its obsession with ratings, driven by power-hungry television executives having  just slightly fewer scruples than Genghis Khan, television is one activity which is ripe for satirising, and this film pulls off some of the obvious jokes with moderate success.  The best part of the film is the skit on the "confessions programme", where a jealous wife embarrasses her husband before a live studio audience, with a stripper on hand to provide diversionary entertainment.  Thierry Lhermitte plays the programme’s presenter in a disturbing caricature of himself, the ever-smiling TV celebrity with more charisma than brain cells.

Although there are some brilliant comic moments, the film overall is a little flat and not entirely satisfying.  The acting is generally fine, with Christian Clavier in particularly fine form.  The problem lies in a script which lacks sophistication (going all too often for the quick obvious laugh) and a rambling plot which bears little relation with the film’s title.

Also, many of the jokes would be almost entirely lost on an non-French audience (for example, the witty "YAM = Y en a marre" gag).  On the other hand, anyone familiar with French television (in particular, France 2’s seemingly doomed attempts to recruit a presenter for their own evening news programme to counter the popularity of Patrick Poivre d’Arvor on their rival TF1) will find many of the jokes irresistibly funny.

© James Travers 2002

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