Un homme et son chien (2009)
Directed by Francis Huster

Film Review

Francis Huster's Un homme et son chien was always going to be a risky venture.  Any film that attempts a remake of a cinematic masterpiece - in this case Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. (1952) - is tempting Providence.  Any film that tries to bring back a cultural icon of the past - namely Jean-Paul Belmondo - a decade into his retirement is equally courageous.  To attempt both of these impossible things in the same film is not just brave - it is almost certainly insane.  Hence the critical onslaught that came Huster's way when his film crashed and burned at the French box office in 2009.  Like the ill-fated Concorde, it was an expensive accident waiting to happen, the final humiliating blow to Belmondo's career and presumably the end of Huster's ambitions to be a serious filmmaker.

The adverse critical reaction to Un homme et son chien was entirely predictable but it is also entirely justifiable.  The film stinks.  Like a charnel house in a heatwave.  It doesn't give Belmondo a chance to prove he is still in possession of his faculties, let alone convince us he can still act.  Right from the very first shot Huster makes it clear he has no talent whatsoever as a film director and what ensues is 94 life-sapping minutes of unbearable tedium as the whole grisly enterprise staggers along like a dying man dragging himself across the pavement to the nearest cemetery.  If the direction is bad, the acting is positively diabolical and you wonder how an actor of Huster's ability could have allowed his cast to get away with such lamentable, totally unconvincing work.

Barely intelligible, visibly drained, Belmondo is the merest shadow of his former self, and watching him being immolated in this grotesque fashion invites nothing but pity.  Un homme et son chien is a film that has absolutely no redeeming features and you just wish the gods in their mercy had done something to prevent it from being made.  It is an insult to De Sica, an insult to Belmondo and, most of all, an insult to anyone who decides to watch it.  You can forgive Huster his ineptitude, you can forgive the lead actor for being off-form, but you cannot forgive the producers who lured Belmondo into this unedifying spectacle of mediocrity, possibly for the most cynical of motives.   Anyone who has any respect for Belmondo is advised to give this film a very wide berth.

Film Synopsis

For many years, Charles, an elderly professor, has lived with the widow of his best friend.  When she tells him that she is about to remarry and that there is no longer any place for him or his dog in her house he is saddened but agrees to go.  But where can he go to?  He has no friends, no family, no money.  The only home he has now is the street, and no one seems to notice him there...