Les Babas Cool (1981) - film review

Whilst driving through rural France, Antoine Bonfils comes across a community of babas - men and women who have turned their back on the modern commercialist world and live, free of constraints, as close to nature as they can.  After a tiff with his girlfriend, he decides to swap his comfortable but empty life in Paris for a new life with the babas.  Adapting to the new life-style proves to be far from easy...

François Leterrier (lead actor in Robert Bresson’s Un condamné à mort s’est échappé , 1956) directed this light-weight comedy at a time when ecological concerns were beginning to take hold in France, in the late 1970s.  The film features many of the actors of the comedy troupe L’Equipe du splendid, who starred in such films as Les Bronzés (1978), notably Christian Clavier, Marie-Anne Chazel and Anémone.  Whilst the film has a certain charm and some memorable comic moments, it is overall a pretty limp, lacklustre affair, with a tedious rambling narrative and no clear message.

© James Travers 2006

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