Les Trois frères (1995) - film review

Didier, Bernard and Pascal – three men from three very different walks of life – are brought together in a solicitor’s office when they each learn of their mother’s death. Not only do they each acquire two brothers whose existence they knew nothing about, but they also find they have inherited three million French francs from their mother.  Naturally, this newfound wealth will change their lives.  Didier will no longer be dependent on the support of a Bourgeois family that he despises.  Bernard no longer needs to scrape a living in street markets.  And Pascal can at last accelerate his executive career.  However, when they next meet in the solicitor’s office two days later they discover that their inheritance has passed to an orphanage because the deadline in their mother’s will has expired.  The news is catastrophic and within a few days the three men are penniless and homeless.  To make matters worse, Didier has just discovered that he has a young son, Michael, the product of a brief affair with an airhostess.  Taking Michael under their wing, the three brothers go on the run when they believe they have killed a bailiff.  They resort to petty crimes – stealing cars and robbing shops – as they evade the police hunt for the missing child.  How long will their adventure continue...?

Didier Bourdon, Bernard Campan and Pascal Légitimus – a.k.a. "Les Inconnus" – are reunited in this popular comedy, which was also directed by Bourdon and Campan.  Prior to this film (which won the César for the best first film), the three actors had appeared together in Jean-Pierre Vergne’s Le téléphone sonne toujours deux fois (1985) and in theatre productions, with great popular success.   Les Trois frères provides an excellent vehicle for the three actors and was a hugely popular film when it was released in 1995 (attracting an audience of six million spectators in France).  A crazy mix of road movie, social commentary and brazen satire, the film rambles pretty aimlessly as it shamelessly mocks one French institution after another (lawyers, the police, high-powered executives, the courts, TV game shows, etc.), but it manages to keep the jokes coming and is overall an entertaining film.

There are some obvious similarities with Coline Serreau’s 1985 hit, 3 hommes et un couffin.  Both films show three very different men discovering an improbable friendship through the shared experience of looking after a child.  However, Les Trois frères is closer in spirit to the traditional French comic farce and, given that it was directed by two men instead of one woman, has an unmistakably male perspective of the situation.  This is reflected both in the comic situations – which are much more exaggerated and more prone to vulgarity than in Serreau’s film – and in the artificiality of the film’s more touching sequences (although one of these, the scene where Bourdon reads from "Le petit prince" works rather well).  The film’s lack of direction is occasionally trying – and there is a point where you wonder if the film is ever going to end (the deadly static courtroom scene at the end of the film was definitely a mistake).  However, the ebullient contributions from the three talented lead actors and some skilfully contrived comedy makes this a diverting, if not entirely satisfying, comedy.

© James Travers 2004

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