Film Review
Fred Cavayé's filmmaking career got off to a commendable start with
three slick, well-paced action thrillers:
Pour elle (2008),
À bout pourtant (2010)
and
Mea culpa (2014).
For his fourth feature, he changes tack and applies his directing talents
to an altogether different genre - comedy. This isn't Cavayé's
first brush with comedy, as he previously contributed a humorous sketch to
the anthology film
Les Infidèles
(2012), and it is unlikely to be his last, given that the film has attracted
an audience of three million in France.
Radin! stars Dany Boon
and is the kind of bargain basement comedy that Boon would himself have directed
had he been inclined to do so. After his box office smash
Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis
(2008), Boon has so far helmed three similar undemanding crowdpleasers and
the most surprising thing about
Radin! is that rather than direct
the film himself he places himself in the hands of a director with next to
no experience in the comedy genre.
Like Boon's own directorial efforts,
Radin! starts out with a single
good idea which it then proceeds to flog to death, with increasing desperation
as the film progresses. It's essentially an updated version of Molière's
L'Avare, albeit with a far less ample quantity of human interest and
humour. Cavayé and his star do what they can with the film's
mediocre material (the script looks as if it should have gone through at
least another half a dozen re-writes) but they struggle to make the film
even remotely entertaining, there being only a finite number of times you
can replay the same gag about a man with a pathological aversion to spending
his own money. Even an actor as habitually likeable as Dany Boon fails
to make his grotesque skinflint character sympathetic - and this is one of
the killer weaknesses of the film.
Despite being portrayed by some very capable actors (Noémie Schmidt
and Laurence Arné both deserve far better), none of the characters
rings true and this, together with a fairly incoherent and pretty incredible
plot, makes the paucity of humour even harder to bear. By the film's
mid-point the gags (actually, it's the same single gag re-used over and over)
have definitely passed their use-by date and thereafter your are more likely
to cringe than laugh at Boon's hopeless attempts to juggle the conflicting
needs of fatherhood, an unlikely romance and his habitual meanness.
The
parsimonious lack of imagination that
hampers the whole film is most apparent in an ending that is unbelievably
crass.
Radin! has very little to commend it, and yet it
was a box office hit, so I am clearly missing something.
© James Travers 2017
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
François Gautier, a music teacher in his forties, may be a talented
violinist but he is also the stingiest man on earth. Nothing brings
him out in a cold sweat faster than the arrival of the bill at the end of
a restaurant meal, and scarcely a thing gets into his shopping trolley without
it having first exceeded its sell-by date. He has enough money to live
a comfortable middleclass life but he'd rather save his hard-earned cash
and live in a dark, unheated house than fork out for such luxuries as electricity
and light bulbs. How fortunate he is to have a bank manager willing
to offer his services as a therapist, at no extra charge! But François's
happy miserly existence is threatened when he falls for his orchestra's new
cellist, Valérie. Dating is a new concept for the middle-aged
skinflint and he is not psychologically equipped for its pecuniary impact.
François is barely coming to grips with this new crisis in his life
when the daughter he never knew he had (the result of a condom that was well
past its use-by date) suddenly turns up on his doorstep. It is a miser's
worst nightmare come true...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.