Ne jouez pas avec les Martiens (1968)
Directed by Henri Lanoë

Film Review

Jean Rochefort is not only a great actor, he is also something of a cult figure, a status he owes to some of the weirder films he lent his talents to. Few of these films are weirder than the Breton-bashing sci-fi parody Ne jouez pas avec les Martiens, in which Rochefort plays an inept reporter who finds contact with visitors from a distant galaxy a somewhat more agreeable prospect than any kind of intercourse with the inhabitants of a remote Brittany island.  More often than not, sci-fi spoofs tend to fall into the trap of being too silly for their own good, but this little-known French oddity gets away with its silliness by playing the humour totally dead pan throughout, the kind of comedy that suited Rochefort best.

Ne jouez pas avec les Martiens is based on Michel Labry's novel Les Sextuplés de Locmaria and is the only film to be directed by Henri Lanoë, a renowned film editor whose distinguished list of credits includes Pierre Étaix's Yoyo (1965), Jacques Deray's Flic Story  (1975) and Joseph Losey's Monsieur Klein (1976).  Lanoë edited many of Philippe de Broca's films (Le Magnifique, Le Cavaleur, Le Bossu), so it was presumably by way of recompense that de Broca helped script Lanoë's sole film as a director. The sillier interludes in the film have de Broca's unmistakable imprint stamped all over them and you wonder how much stranger and funnier it might have been without his comédie populaire input.

What is most interesting about the film is how it takes the familiar sci-fi clichés and uses these to mock not the genre but rather the habits of the insular, stranger-hating Bretons.  The presence of the silver-cladded, cats' eyed aliens (a look that is eerily similar to the one adopted by David Bowie in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)) is almost incidental - much of the humour is directed at the quaint folk of Brittany.  The best gag comes when it is revealed that the unnamed father of sextuplets turns out to be a passing extra-terrestrial.  "We would have preferred it to have been someone from these parts" one of the locals solemnly observes, presumably just before he goes off and sets fire to a Parisian.

The plot is pretty insubstantial and after the shock sudden appearance of the extra-terrestrials (who, it is worth mentioning, come not from Mars but from the far superior planet of Gamma-2) nothing much seems to happen.  Of course, the main joke is how the Bretons react to the robotic-looking aliens - rather than being thrown into a panic (in typical B-movie fashion), they just seem to treat them as they would any other party of outsiders, indifference tempered with disdain and mistrust.  Try as they might to blend in, the planet hoppers are never made to feel welcome, even when they put aside their disintegrator guns and take to wearing the famous Brittany coiffe.  How weirdly contemporary the film now feels.

Just what the aliens are doing in Brittany is hard to fathom - they claim to have picked up a message that rogue Martians have landed in the vicinity but then they admit there is no life on Mars.  Apart from getting blind drunk on the local hooch and putting young Breton women in the family way there doesn't seem to be much to entice a being from the other side of the galaxy to this provincial backwater.  Maybe they just like the scenery.  Released in France during that historic month of May 1968, Ne jouez pas avec les Martiens, needless to say, came and went without anyone noticing.  But then, as any UFO spotter will tell you, extra-terrestrials like to be discrete...

Film Synopsis

René Mastier, a reporter for a Parisian newspaper, and his photographer Paddy are too busy enjoying the high life in Rio de Janeiro to notice a riot breaking out in the streets around them.  Hastily summoned back to Paris by their far from happy employer, they are given a new assignment: to report on the birth of quintuplets on an island off the coast of Brittany.  Arriving on the island, René and Paddy are informed by the local doctor, Créache, that the pregnant girl is not married and the identity of the father is unknown.  As a joke, the nurse Yvonne uses the journalists' telex to inform the outside world that Martians have landed on the island.  Unfortunately, the report is taken seriously and within no time the French president is making preparations to welcome the visiting aliens at the Élysée Palace.  No sooner has René admitted the hoax to his employer than a party of real extra-terrestrials shows up, demanding to know where the Martians are...