Casque bleu (1994)
Directed by Gérard Jugnot

Film Review

With four full-length films comfortably under his directorial belt, Gérard Jugnot is starting to exude the confidence of a man who isn't going to let good taste or squeamish gutter-press-informed public sensibilities get in the way of a good film.  The first part of Casque bleu looks like another instalment in the Les Bronzés series of films, with the same tepid comedy and parodied characters having fun in a sumptuous exotic location.   Just when the film appears to have settled into a comfortable, albeit dull, groove, it goes off in a totally different direction, and thereafter tries to look on the sunnier side of a gruesome civil war and hostage situation.

This sounds pretty grim, but Jugnot is careful not to cause offence, perhaps a little too careful.  It's interesting to compare this film with Jugnot's subsequent Faillait pas…!, a light-hearted romp closely based on true-life ritual mass suicide, in which any notion of good taste was soundly strangled at birth (before being decapitated, dissolved in acid and flushed down the toilet).   Casque bleu is by contrast pretty mild stuff, the most shocking thing probably being what Micheline Presle is given to wear.

It would be easy to write this film off as just another bog-standard French comedy - a muddle of implausible plot developments, shallow characterisation and lowbrow humour.  On the strength of Jugnot's earlier films, one is, however, driven to read more into it than this.  Could the film not be a timely comment on the complacency of the supposedly civilised West, a critique on how it reacts to external conflict and protects its own interests?   When a crisis erupts in a developing country, the first reaction of the Western nations is to evacuate its own citizens (thereby hampering legitimate refugee activity) and then either to do absolutely nothing (on the assumption that Time is a much better healer than the U.N.) or totally the wrong thing (i.e. start dropping bombs, often on innocent civilians).  Jugnot manages to get some of this across in the film, but perhaps not as forcefully as he might.   He would doubtless have been more daring if he had made the film after the events of 2003 (i.e. if the Iraq Invasion and not the Balkans War had been his inspiration).

The presence of so many big name film actors in the cast list is a sure sign that the production team was far more preoccupied with entertaining a mainstream French audience than lecturing them on the double standards of the West.   That said, it's not a bad film.  The performances are okay, the script and direction are certainly no worse than a comparable Hollywood offering.  However, it's most likely the haphazard off-the-wall comedy and the wonderful Micheline Presle / Claude Piéplu double act (repeated in Fallait Pas…!) which ultimately sells the film.  It's just a pity that the deeper political messages are so muted.

Film Synopsis

Bordeaux winegrower Patrick Ponsac finds himself on the receiving end of his jealous wife's ire when he dares to start an affair with another woman.  A hot-blooded Spaniard, Alicia Ponsac is not likely to forgive her husband's infidelity but Patrick at least makes an attempt to earn her forgiveness, by taking her to a Mediterranean island for the holiday of a life time.  It was on this spot that they had spent their honeymoon many years ago but Patrick's hopes for a happy reconciliation are shot to pieces when a civil war breaks out in the vicinity.  Accompanied by an eclectic bunch of neurotics and eccentrics, Patrick and Alicia attempt to flee the country, but having failed to do so they fall into the hands of a party of merciless guerrillas...