Moi y’en a vouloir des sous (1973)

Moi y’en a vouloir des sous is a French-Italian film comedy first released in 1973, directed by Jean Yanne.  The film stars Jean Yanne, Bernard Blier, Nicole Calfan, Michel Serrault and Fernand Ledoux.  It has also been released under the title: Me, I Want to Have Dough.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


In 1973, the landscape of urban France is coloured by protracted strikes and demonstrations by left-wing political activists. Banners and barricades fill the streets.  A financial adviser for a large corporation, Benoît Lepape considers himself above this proletarian struggle - at least he does until the day he is dismissed by his boss for using his initiative without permission.  When challenged by his uncle Adrien to come up with a better means of serving the interests of the working man than strikes and demonstrations, Benoît has a brainwave: use the tools of capitalism to defeat capitalism!  He persuades Adrien to give him his union’s funds so that he can buy a bicycle factory.  The venture is a success.  In no time at all, Benoît accumulates a fortune and begins to build a vast business empire, having convinced his employees that his wealth belongs to them.  But when Benoît announces that he wants to quit and hand over the running of his companies to his employees, they demand that he stays.  They are even ready to strike to force him to remain...

There are not many films that convey how life was in France in the early 1970s better than this zany satirical romp, the second film to be directed by the popular actor-comedian Jean Yanne.  Moi y’en a vouloir des sous at first sight appears to be little more than an anti-capitalist rant, having much in common with Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Week End, in which Yanne had played the leading role.  However, on closer examination, the subtext is somewhat more ambiguous than this, and the film begins to appear less a condemnation of capitalism and more a skit on the failure of left-wing politics to achieve positive social change.

Whilst it is funny – in some places hilariously so – Moi y’en a vouloir des sous is evidently a cry of despair.  It laments the harm that capitalism causes not just to society and to individuals but also – and here the film is perhaps ahead of its time – to the environment.  Yet it also admits that left-wing politics will never succeed in taming the capitalist beast and, will in fact be seduced by it into becoming its willing handmaiden.  How prescient.  Just as the characters in this story sell out to achieve their aims, so socialist parties across the Western world would, in the course of the two decades that followed, jettison most (if not all) of their left-wing ideology just to get themselves into power and keep themselves in power for as long as possible.  As the film’s closing caption succinctly puts it: the world is made of idiots who fight against the rest to preserve an absurd society.

© James Travers 2009

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