Enfants de salaud (1996)
Directed by Tonie Marshall

Film Review

Enfants de salaud is the third full-length film from actress-turned director Tonie Marshall, an entertaining comedy featuring some of the best acting talent in French cinema. The film's biggest draw is the much-loved actor/comedian Jean Yanne who plays a Gallic version of Hannibal Lecter, admittedly a more obviously comical portrayal of contained insanity and unscrupulousness than Anthony Hopkins' in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) but one that still evokes sympathy and menace by the bucket load.  Tonie Marshall certainly knows how to assemble a great cast and here she surpasses herself.  Anémone, Nathalie Baye, Molly Ringwald and François Cluzet make a superlative quartet, each actor revelling in the director's screwball universe where the most improbable of relationships are forged and characters find their comfortable world torn inside-out by unexpected developments - often with a gratifying sense of truth and irony.

Marshall's real-life mother, the legendary actress Micheline Presle (star of such French classics as Félicie Nanteuil (1945) and Boule de suif (1945)), makes a brief but arresting cameo appearance.  Less coherent and realistic than Tonie Marshall's other films, Enfants de salaud is nonetheless an enjoyable romp with some great comic moments.  It is a film which offers a valid reflection on contemporary life, about how men and women (clearly the end-result of two completely separate processes of evolution) relate to one another in the post-feminist, post-industrial, post-just-about-everything era, and about how individuals cope with the demise of the nuclear family and make alternative social structures.  It's an honest portrayal of life as it is now lived - random, messy and full of answered questions - with an edge of dark cynicism and more than a soupçon of provocative slapstick. Immediately after this Marshall went on to win acclaim and a fistful of César nominations with her fourth film, Vénus beauté (institut) (1999), which earned a promising newcomer Audrey Tautou her first César.

Film Synopsis

When Julius Mandenne is put on trial for the unspeakably gruesome murder of his lady friend, his past comes back to haunt him in the guise of his four illegitimate children, each the product of a brief liaison with a different woman.  Sophie, Sylvette, Susan and Sandro - the four half-siblings who hadn't previously met - are each equally interested in finding out more about each other and what could possibly have motivated their father to kill someone in such a macabre and senseless fashion.  Whilst Sando, a mechanic and committed Christian, succumbs to the temptation of Susan, a glamorous young actress with a tough feminist streak, Sophie decides that Sylvette, a naïve waitress-cum-stripper, is just what she needs to re-ignite her husband's dormant conjugal appetite.   After several interviews with his unwanted offspring, Julius decides the time has come to bequeath his fortune - to Sylvette.  Or so it would seem…