Pourquoi pas! (1977) - film review

A rundown suburban villa is home to three individuals who live happily together.  Fernand and Alexa are fugitives from ill-fated marriages; Louis is a young bisexual musician who couldn’t get on with his parents.  The strange ménage attracts the attentions of a police inspector, but he is also drawn into this world of mutual tolerance and free love, becoming their friend when his own wife leaves him.  The happy community looks as if it might be falling apart when Fernand falls in love with a young middleclass woman...

Although it feels slightly dated now, Coline Serreau’s second full-length film is an entertaining tongue-in-cheek piece which was actually rather daring when it was first released (bisexuality was pretty taboo even in France of the 1970s).  There are shades of Buñel in the way bourgeois attitudes are portrayed and made fun of, but the film is, for the most part, a pretty conventional French comedy drama – in the style of Jacques Rivette - revolving around that perennial favourite, the ménage-à-trois (only here, it really is a ménage).  Whilst the film doesn’t quite hold together as well as some of Serreau’s later films – such as the classic Trois hommes et un couffin (1985) – there are some deliciously funny moments.  There are meaty contributions from the three leads (notably Sami Frey), but these are almost eclipsed by Michel Aumont, who gives a touching comic portrayal of a police inspector going through a midlife crisis.

© James Travers 2005

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