Film Review
Jean Yanne's most virulent assault on his fellow countrymen came with
his third and most ambitious satirical feature,
Les
Chinois à Paris. Inspired by Robert Beauvais's book
Quand les Chinois... (1966),
Yanne uses the far-fetched fiction of a Chinese invasion of France to
deliver the most scathing of commentaries on the behaviour of the
French people at the time of the Nazi occupation (1940-1944). It
was only two years before this that Marcel Ophüls's
Le Chagrin et la pitié (1971)
had its first theatrical release, after its planned airing on the
state-owned French television channel ORTF had been vetoed by its board
of directors. Ophüls's film, which purported to relate what
actually happened in France during the war, as opposed to the fiction
created afterwards by President de Gaulle, was to have seismic
implications, and when Yanne's film came out not long afterwards it
poured even more fat into an overheated frying pan, with predictable
results.
Much of the criticism that came Yanne's way was hurled at him by
left-wing militants appalled by what they saw as a vulgar, ill-informed
onslaught on Maoism, but there was as much opprobrium from those who
took umbrage at his attempts to find humour in what was still a highly
sensitive subject, namely the Occupation. For the most part,
Yanne presents the invading Chinese in a positive light (they are
a humane, civilised race who seem to have an aversion to violence
and end up being corrupted by the French!) and
reserves most of his barbed mockery for the occupied French, who,
having submitted to the invasion, go on to derive as much personal gain
as they can from it. The Occupation becomes an easy excuse for
appalling behaviour which would scarcely be tolerated by any society in
normal circumstances, and one suspects the reason why the film met with
such a fierce backlash was because it was far closer to the truth than
most French people would dare to admit. The shame of the
Occupation was not the surrender but the gutless, self-serving
complicity that it engendered among a far from insignificant sector of
the population.
Prior to
Les Chinois à Paris,
Jean Yanne had made two films in which his personal anti-capitalist,
anti-consumerist sentiments are readily apparent, along with a certain
scepticism as to the efficacy of left-wing politics in putting things
right and creating a better society. Yanne's political
ambivalence is even more strongly felt in his third film, which feels
like a pitiful cry of despair, an admission that there is something in
the French psyche that is fundamentally rotten and can never be put
right. His condemnation may have a humorous ring to it but his
assessment of French amorality is much harsher, much less forgiving
than what we find in
Le Chagrin et
la pitié, and stripped of its manic forays into farce and
absurdity, the film would be intolerably cruel. Lacking the
structure and directness of Yanne's other zany comedies,
Les Chinois à Paris
struggles to make a coherent statement and ends up resembling just
another vague anti-everything rant that is only just redeemed by its
boisterous sense of fun (Blier and Serrault are hilarious) and a sly
homage to Jean-Luc Godard's
Week-End (1967), in which Yanne
had previously starred.
© James Travers 2015
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Next Jean Yanne film:
Chobizenesse (1975)
Film Synopsis
The Chinese have invaded Europe! In the ensuing panic, the French
President flees to America, leaving the citizens of France, who are
forced to manufacture pipes, to rediscover the joys of denunciation and
hypocrisy. Meanwhile, General Pou-Yen sets up his government at
the Lafayette Galleries in Paris. It's a return to the good old
days, with blackmarketeers thriving, along with other unscrupulous
so-and-sos who know how to turn a bad situation to their advantage -
men like Régis Forneret, who converts his sex shop into a
Chinese restaurant. Now that cars have been outlawed, Forneret
realises that he can make a fortune by selling rickshaws. But the
Chinese overlords are finding it increasingly difficult to restrain the
wicked ways of their French minions, and soon begin to fall prey to
their vices. Even the austere Pou-Yen weakens as he succumbs to
the charms of Stéphanie Lefranc, the beautiful secretary of
the industrialist Grégoire Montclair. In the end, he
allows himself to be persuaded by Forneret that he should allow the
French to wallow in their cesspit of debauchery. But what will
become of those who have been won over by Marxist-Leninist ideology..?
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.