9 mois ferme (2013)
Directed by Albert Dupontel

Film Review

With four cinematic oddities already under his belt, Albert Dupontel goes into theatre-of-the-absurd overdrive with his latest film, a totally unhinged black comedy that pokes fun at the multiple failings of the French judicial system.  A kind of rabidly punk Chaplin with an unbridled appetite for Grand Guignol excess, Dupontel is one of French cinema's most vitriolic social commentators - evidenced by his previous socially themed comedies Bernie (1996) and Enfermés dehors (2006) - and 9 mois ferme, his latest bout of a madcap mischief-making, is as sharply pertinent as a Ken Loach film, only much, much funnier.

The anarchic, cartoon-like humour may be about as subtle as a luminescent house-brick lobbed through a car windscreen but it rarely misses its mark, even if most of the best gags are in stomach-churningly bad taste.  Dupontel acknowledges his debt to Monty Python (his main source of inspiration) by reproducing one or two of their most famous gags and giving one of the gang, Terry Gilliam, a prominent cameo role.  Gilliam is just one of a host of familiar faces who turn up unexpectedly, others including Yolande Moreau, Bouli Lanners and Jean Dujardin, as well as odd-ball directors Gaspar Noé and Jan Kounen.  It's almost the cinematic equivalent of a Victorian freak show.

Every monster menagerie needs a fair princess to inject a little sanity and humanity into the proceedings and this is no exception.  Here the princess in question is the supremely talented Sandrine Kiberlain, whose last shared credit with Dupontel was on Jacques Audiard's Un héros très discret (1996).  The sensitive Kiberlain is an unlikely choice perhaps for the female lead in an Albert Dupontel flight of fancy, but, as the emotionally repressed judge who is forced into an improbable alliance with an eye-eating serial killer (Dupontel of course), she acquits herself magnificently.

At heart, for all its grotesque digressions, 9 mois ferme is a quintessential Gallic rom-com, and there are some exquisite moments of tenderness that are guaranteed to bring a tear to the eye of the most stony hearted of cynics.  Sadly, these humane touches do not linger in the mind as easily as the recurrent somersaults into pitch-black comedy and tend to get lost in the barrage of comic hijinks and frenetic stylisation.  Dupontel's most energetic, most inspired film so far, this latest spectacle of lowbrow mirth has everything it needs to be a sure-fire success with a mainstream French audience, apart from a modicum of good taste and a decent ending.

Film Synopsis

Ariane Felder is a middle-aged woman who conducts herself as scrupulously in her private life as she does in her career as a highly respected magistrate. How, then, can it be possible that such a morally upstanding single person as herself is pregnant? Even more bizarre are the findings of a paternity test which prove that the father of her unborn child is a man who is going through the criminal courts on a charge of violent assault. Ariane is completely bewildered by this strange turn of events, but she is absolutely determined to get to the bottom of it, come what may...