Les Bronzés 3 – amis pour la vie (2006) - film review

For nearly three decades, ever since their first meeting during an eventful Club Med holiday in 1978, Nathalie, Bernard, Gigi, Jean-Claude, Jerôme and Popeye have kept in touch.  They now meet up once a year at Popeye’s luxury hotel on the island of Sardinia.  Popeye’s friends may have invested a token amount in the hotel, but it is his millionaire wife, Graziella, who really bankrolls this Italian dream.  But Popeye, being Popeye, is still cavorting after every piece of female flesh that registers on his radar.  On this latest trip, Jerôme had been hoping to make things up with his ex-wife Gigi, so he is stunned when he learns that she has shacked up with Jean-Claude, the one-time loser who is now the owner of a chain of hairdressing salons in America.  Bernard is delighted when his son Benjamin announces he is to get married, but is sent into a speechless stupor when Benjamin reveals his intended partner is male.  A greater shock is in store for Jerôme when Christiane, one of his former patients, turns up, with the intention of repaying him in kind for some beauty treatment he did which went horribly wrong.  And then Jean-Claude becomes the victim of a mysterious clawed beast.  Clearly, this will be a holiday to remember – if any of them lives to tell the tale...

Despite a severe mauling from the critics, Les Bronzés 3 was the big event in French cinema in 2006, achieving a spectacular sale of 10.4 million tickets, putting it comfortably into the top ten of the most successful French films made to date.  The reason for the film’s popularity is not hard to see - it marks the eagerly awaited reunion of L’Equipe du splendide, the café-theatre troupe who shot to fame in the mid to late 1970s, appearing in films such as Les Bronzés (1978), Les Bronzés font du ski (1979). and Le Père Noël est une ordure (1982), all of which have become enduring cult classics of French cinema.  The unique collective talent of L’Equipe du splendide is borne out by the fact that virtually of all its members have become household names in France, achieving huge success as actors and filmmakers.

Les Bronzés 3 picks up from where we left off 27 years ago, with the motley ensemble of holiday lovers and incorrigible skirt chasers showing absolutely no sign of slowing down into a peaceful and dignified old age.  Some of the faces may look older (although some appear remarkably unchanged), but it is the same collection of misfits with anger management and libido problems that we first met in the late 1970s.  And the film is directed by Patrice Leconte, the director of the first two Bronzés films, who has since earned international recognition as a filmmaker.

So does the film, yet another sequel-cum-nostalgia-fest, live up to expectations?  The short answer to that is no, but it does deliver a reasonable quota of laughs, for all its faults.  The problem with the film is that it doesn’t add anything beyond what we saw in first two Bronzés films, and in fact the jokes aren’t anywhere near as good as they were in those films.  If the first two films were a mouth-watering Chrismas Day dinner, this would have to be the reheated leftovers to be endured on Boxing Day – the same ingredients, but somehow far less appetising.  Worse, much of the humour in this film is horribly clichéd and dated – you almost feel, watching this film, that you have stepped back in time nearly thirty years, to a time when crude jokes about facial disfigurement, homophobia, breast enlargements and self-obsessed men obsessing over their biological function were considered funny.  The script – written by its cast – is the weakest element of this film, clearly the worst that Leconte has had to direct, but luckily it isn’t so bad as to kill the film.

The script is mediocre, Leconte’s direction uninspired, but France’s best ensemble cast comes to the rescue and captures some of the anarchic fun of the original Bronzés films.   The collective talent of so many great comic performers – particularly Gérard Jugnot, Michel Blanc and Josiane Balasko – makes this a far more entertaining and appealing film than it deserves to be.  If the film makes you laugh it is more likely to be in response to one of Jugnot’s mad comic improvisations than anything in the script.   Definitely not a patch on the first films of L’Equipe du splendide, but the real pleasure of Bronzés 3 derives not from the film itself but from the joy of seeing so many familiar, well-loved faces together again after such a long time.  Friends reunited, remembrance of things past, and a strange longing for the lost uninhibited zaniness of the 1970s...

© James Travers 2008

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?