Qu'est-ce qu'on a encore fait au bon Dieu? (2019)
Directed by Philippe de Chauveron

Film Review

After effortlessly notching up an audience of over six million, Qu'est-ce qu'on a encore fait au Bon Dieu? (a.k.a. Serial Bad Weddings 2) is likely to be the biggest hit at the French box office in 2019, but of course this is no indicator of quality.  Like its predecessor Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu? (2014), which attracted over 12 million cinemagoers in France, the film serves up another dispiriting dose of facile gags carelessly scatter-gunned over a lazily thrown-together narrative that tries to extract as much crass humour as it possibly can from the French nation's propensity for racial intolerance.  The joke is, sad to say, beyond the humorous faculties of this reviewer.

Having attached his name to a slew of mainstream comedies to which the epithets 'dire' and 'puerile' are mandatory (the worst being the truly execrable Les Vacances de Ducobu), director Philippe de Chauveron does not seem to be a man who is ever likely to repent his decision to pursue success by the lowest road imaginable.  What is more surprising is why so many capable actors (Christian Clavier, Chantal Lauby, Frédérique Bel) are so willing to assist him in his crimes against good taste and general cinematic decency.  Not content with poking fun at racial minorities and the innate xenophobic tendencies of the French, de Chauveron and his co-screenwriter Guy Laurent widen their scope slightly to take in other contemporary bugbears - homophobia and Islamist terrorism - albeit with all the satirical flair of your average three-year-old.

The infantile writing and gormless direction would make Qu'est-ce qu'on a encore fait au Bon Dieu? a gruelling cinema experience for anyone with at least a double digit IQ.  But throw in a cast who look as if they have been dosed up to the eyeballs with steroids and amphetamines and you have a celluloid atrocity that comes damn near close to being a flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention on Human Rights.  Confronted with the life-sapping challenge of fielding some of the worst gags ever conceived, the default action of each cast member is to deliver it with as much misplaced gusto as is humanly possible, as if making absolutely nothing out of diddly-squat was the coolest preoccupation on the planet.

To be fair, the film does at least (sort of) acknowledge that racism is not a good thing - although this 'message' is likely to pass way over the heads of anyone who is likely to find the film remotely entertaining.  If you are the kind of person to laugh at inane gags about Arabs and Jews, you're unlikely to latch onto the film's half-hearted attempts at encouraging us to overcome our racial prejudices, especially when these do even less to make us see the error of our ways than Gérard Oury's Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob (1973), whose own delightful package of crude racial stereotyping appears hyper-sophisticated compared with de Chauveron's.

Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu? was a pretty inglorious attempt to scrape the bottom of a very nasty barrel, but at least it had some novelty value.  Its even more misguided sequel hasn't even that, and after the spate of terrorist incidents and social unrest that have hit France in the intervening years it seems scarcely credible that the film could even have been conceived, let alone made.  It's just a grotesque compendium of the basest kind of humour, and the fact that the film has raked in so much money in France and other countries merely drives home the depressing fact that racism is so deeply engrained in western culture that we will never be rid of it.

Film Synopsis

Although the idea appalled them at first, Claude and Marie Verneuil have finally grown to accept their four daughters' choice of husbands, all coming from racial minorities in France.  This most Catholic of bourgeois couples have travelled the world to meet their in-laws and now find themselves back in France to face yet another calamity.  It seems that their daughters and their respective husbands have had enough of France and plan to leave the country as soon as they can to start a new life elsewhere.

Chao has his sights set on a prestigious banking job in China, Odile and David plan to settle in Israel, and Isabelle and Rachid intend moving to Algeria.  Meanwhile, Laure and Charles are about to head off to India, where the latter has high hopes of a big career in Bollywood.  The idea that their big happy family is about to break up and disperse itself across the globe is one that sickens Claude and Marie, and so they resolve to do whatever they can to make their precious offspring see sense and stay with them in France.  It is at this crucial moment that Charles' parents, André and Madeleine Koffi, arrive in France to attend the wedding of their daughter Viviane.  Little do they know that Viviane intends to marry another woman...