Vipère au poing (2004)

Vipère au poing is a French film comedy-drama first released in 2004, directed by Philippe de Broca.  The film is based on a novel by Hervé Bazin and stars Catherine Frot, Jacques Villeret, Jules Sitruk, Cherie Lunghi and Hannah Taylor-Gordon.  It has also been released under the title: Viper in the Fist.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


In middle-age, Jean Rezeau recalls his eventful childhood, beginning with the death of his grandmother in 1926.  Hitherto, Jean and his elder brother Freddie had enjoyed a happy life in the family’s country estate, cherished by their grandmother and their servants.  All this was to change when their mother and father returned from Indochina to take charge of their upbringing.  Jean and his mother take an immediate dislike to one another, the former’s rebellious spirit merely aggravating the latter’s tyrannical tendencies.  Unable to put up with his mother’s cruel regime any longer, Jean is determined that she should die...

Philippe de Broca’s final film is this adaptation of Hervé Bazin’s first, autobiographical novel.  Although he is remembered for some classic French films – L’Homme de Rio (1964), Le Roi de Coeur (1966) and Le Bossu (1997) to name just three – De Broca has also turned out a fair number of turkeys, most notably the risible Amazone (2000).   Whilst Vipère au poing doesn’t quite plumb the depths of De Broca’s worst films, it is a long, long way from being his best work.

The main reason why the film disappoints is because it focuses too much on the humorous elements of Bazin’s story and almost completely overlooks the tragic dimension.  There are plenty of opportunities for De Broca to make this either a very disturbing film or a very poignant film, but somehow these just pass him by and all we get is a rather puerile depiction of childhood rebellion, the Mark Twain version of Truffaut’s Les 400 coups.  When the narrative does finally get round to explaining why Jean’s mother is such a monster, it does so in a way that is totally unconvincing – concertinaed into the last ten minutes of the film, with the most schmaltzy dialogue you can imagine performed by actors who look as if they graduated from drama school at least two years too early.   It looks as if De Broca had had enough and just gave up.

This is a pity because the first half of the film isn’t too bad, even if it feels more like end-of-the-pier pantomime than film drama (every time Catherine Frot appears you have an uncontrollable urge to boo and hiss, and not just because she is miscast).   Jacques Villeret gives another of his sympathetic performances as a slightly nutty collector of insectoid life – his scenes are the most enjoyable in the film.  Far less successful are the contributions from the child actors, who are either badly cast, under-rehearsed or just badly directed.  Jules Sitruk (the child lead who crops up in this kind of role with alarming regularity) is particularly aggravating, bringing virtually no credibility to his portrayal of the victimised Jean.  Not only does he fail to convey any sense of malice or hurt, but you rather end up feeling that his character actually deserves the brutality that gets meted out to him.

This is the kind of film which probably has far more appeal to children than to adults – pre-teens won’t be quite so offended by the film’s superficiality and should find it easier to engage with the child characters (who, from an adult perspective are grotesquely caricatured).   The production values are also rather good – the film captures the period in which the story is set (between the wars) well, both in the design and the staging.  If only De Broca had given more attention to characterisation and had focussed more on the pathos of Bazin’s novel, the film would have had much greater appeal.

© James Travers 2007


It’s perhaps just as well that I failed to see the television adaptation of Herve Bazin’s autobiographical novel in 1971 because, by all accounts, Alice Sapritch was a definitive folcoche. As it is, I am more than happy to have Catherine Frot’s reading of the role, which for me is definitive unless and/or until I am able to catch up with Mlle Sapritch.  Frot is easily one of the finest French actresses working today, a roster which embraces Isabelle Huppert, Isabelle Carré, Valérie Lemercier, Emmanuelle Béart, Fanny Ardant, Sandrine Bonnaire, Caroline Bouquet, Catherine Deneuve, Sylvie Testud, and so on.  Not least impressive about Frot is her enormous range.  As it happened, I saw Vipère au poing and Les Soeurs fachées within a span of twenty-four hours, and to say they are chalk and cheese is to say there is perhaps a soupçon of difference between Yves Montand and Boy George. In one of these films, Frot is the ditzy, feather-brained yet ultimately warm and adorable sister of Isabelle Huppert; in the other, she is the mother from Hell, who even contrives in close shots to actually resemble a venomous snake.  

Though Frot runs away with the picture in what is a gift of a part for any actress, we should not overlook Jacques Villeret who is also cast against type as the humane but ultimately weak husband and father who is no match for Frot’s ice cold wife and mother.  Jules Sitruk as the most rebellious of the three sons is also excellent, as he was in Monsieur Batignole and Moi César, 10 ans 1/2, 1m39.  Young actors have a habit of falling by the wayside when faced with adult roles but with luck Sitruk will mature into a fine adult actor.  Completing a trio of people out of their comfort zone, director Philippe de Broca is more at home in comedy yet, albeit with the help of the brilliant Frot, he turns in a fine drama.

© Leon Nock (London, England) 2010 

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