Film Review
One of the wettest and most unbearable French comedies of the 1960s,
Comment
epouser un premier ministre must surely have been a career low point
for its stars, Jean-Claude Brialy and Pascal Petit. It is typical of
the mundane so-called comedy fare served up with alarming regularity by director
Michel Boisrond during this decade, often the lamest attempts to imitate
British and American film comedies with high profile stars mercilessly sacrificed
for the sake of a quick buck. Brigitte Bardot had been the willing
sacrificial victim in several of Boisrond's previous films -
Cette sacrée gamine
(1955),
Une Parisienne
(1957),
Voulez-vous
danser avec moi? (1959). Now it was the turn of Pascal Petit
and that darling of the French New Wave, Jean-Claude Brialy. It would
have been kinder to feed live new-born lambs through a wood chipper.
Filmed in luxuriant widescreen and vibrant colour,
Comment epouser un
premier ministre looks sumptuous compared with most French film comedies
of this time, but this extravagant surface gloss can scarcely make up for
the depressing lack of substance - a ridiculously anodyne plot that goes
nowhere, characters that are so two-dimensional they might as well have been
played by cardboard cut-outs, direction that is totally lack in imagination,
and performances that make this whole ghastly package the most effective
soporific money can buy. Heaven knows what induced an actor of Brialy's
calibre to put his name to this mouldering monolith to mediocrity - he looks
more like a man grudgingly serving a prison sentence for a crime he did not
commit than someone happily earning his pay cheque as a comic actor.
Only someone with a superhuman boredom threshold could sit through this ghastly
comedy misfire from start to finish without falling asleep. This is
torture, not entertainment.
© James Travers 2016
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Michel Boisrond film:
Atout coeur à Tokyo pour O.S.S. 117 (1966)
Film Synopsis
Philippe Lambert tries not to let his tendency to be an inveterate womaniser
interfere with his professional duties as a ministerial attaché.
If only he wasn't so good looking, so incredibly irresistible to the opposite
sex! Naturally, his immediate superior is jealous of his amorous reputation
and passes up no occasion to make life difficult for him. This is how
Lambert ends up having to take the place of the Prime Minister at a gala
evening at the opera, a loathsome chore. That fateful evening, Lambert
has the misfortune to lose a letter sent to him by one of his female admirers,
a woman who is married to a man of some importance. The letter is discovered
by a girl who works at the opera, Marion, and she is quick to turn this to
her advantage. She arranges a meeting with Lambert and threatens to
create a scandal unless he intervenes to prevent her family from being evicted
from their apartment. Before he knows it, Lambert is being coerced
into halting the construction of another building adjacent to Marion's and
putting in its place a public swimming pool...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.