Please welcome Gavin McDowell, our Foreign Correspondent who will be dropping this multi-part missive from the world of bad French film.
Hello! Gavin McDowell here—a long-time reader of Tim (since 2011) and an active participant in the Alternate Ending community (since 2019). I have been kindly permitted by our podcast hosts to draw on my experiences as an American ex-pat living in France (and, for five years now, as a naturalized French citizen) to write a six-part monthly series on French films. But not just any French films! French cinema, like Japanese cinema (and unlike, say, Italian or Indian cinema), has an international reputation for being good.
My experience of living in France and other francophone countries for the past ten years is that much of French cinema is, in fact, quite bad. It’s not a complicated explanation. Most French films are crap because most of anything is crap. And France will not export its crap because it has a reputation to maintain. Every now and then a movie becomes so popular locally that it is permitted to slip through the quality control cracks and show international audiences what the average French film is really like. This happened early in the past decade with 2011’s Intouchables, one of those “solve racism” movies in the mold of Crash or Green Book that doesn’t even have to decency to include an homage to Battleship Potemkin. Not only did this get a US release (with a deservedly tepid reception), it was remade six years later as 2017’s The Upside… to, once more, a tepid reception.
Which brings us to the subject of the current post! What about those French films that were remade, but the remake was so successful it eclipsed the original? What follows is a short exposé on three comparatively obscure originals that begot more famous English-languages films. This has the benefit of easing the transition into French film from the more familiar world of Hollywood (though be forewarned of SPOILERS). More importantly, it means that I get to pick films that are not absolutely bottom of the barrel. Keep in mind, though, these are the very best films I will be visiting for the next six months.
Three Men and a Cradle (Trois Hommes et un Couffin, Coline Serreau, 1985)
The false friend couffin might suggest we are dealing with a funeral, but Three Men and a Cradle is instead about life’s beginning. Three incorrigible bachelors, Pierre, Michel, and Jacques, have their lives turned upside-down when one of Jacques’ former flings leaves an unexpected package at their apartment door. That package is the couffin, and its resident, six-month-old Marie, soon becomes the center of the men’s world. Along with a package of heroin that was also left at their doorstep.
This is, of course, the same scenario as Three Men and a Baby (1987), the surprisingly faithful remake starring Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg, and Ted Danson and directed by Leonard Nimoy, whose remake credentials were established a decade earlier with his turn in the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The French film differs mainly in the details. It has no ghosts, for one thing. Also, the heroin subplot—and it is a subplot, even though it eats up at least a third of the film—is never properly resolved. The drugs are eventually passed off to their intended recipients in the French film, but the American version inserts an action climax where the three men chase and apprehend the drug dealers. And then there’s another action climax where the men must stop the baby and her British mother from boarding a plane. Cradle is more somber and introspective. In the original, Sylvia, the mother, is not a foreigner but lives permanently in Paris. The three men can see baby Marie at any time—and, in fact, one of them does. Sylvia is out, but a babysitter is watching Marie, who is sitting on the floor, playing with an empty packet of cigarettes. It’s downright heartbreaking.
Another thing both films have in common is that they were followed by terrible sequels. Three Men and a Little Lady (Emile Ardolino, 1990) goes even harder in the direction of a feature-length sitcom, focusing on the romantic entanglements of Sylvia rather than Mary, the child she callously abandoned in the previous film. Its French counterpart, bringing back the original director and sporting the Dumasian title 18 Years Later (18 ans après, Coline Serreau, 2003), revisits the three men at the cusp of Marie’s adulthood. Sylvia is now married to an American douchebag (perhaps a meta-commentary on the American sequel?), and his nerdy son Arthur is sweet on Marie. It is just as bad as Little Lady but for completely different reasons. It is stuffed with characters and incident, but doesn’t do much to justify its existence. Both films falter on the premise that Marie/Mary is an interesting character rather than a plot device. In terms of cultural differences, however, they are quite distinct: 18 Years Later ends with Marie and Arthur playing a violin duet; Little Lady ends with Boy Meets Girl’s “Waiting for a Star to Fall.”
The Jackpot! (La Totale!, Claude Zidi, 1991)
The Jackpot! stars Thierry Lhermitte of the comedy troupe Le Splendid, behind such cult classics as French Fried Vacation 2 (Les bronzés font du ski, Patrice Leconte, 1979) and Gramps is in the Resistance (Papy fait de la résistance, Jean-Marie Poiré, 1983). Here he plays a middle-aged man who, to his wife and children, assumes the outward appearance of a boring if respectable civil servant. He is, in fact, a civil servant, but he works for a different branch of the French government—the secret service. Under the guise of this lie which happens to be true (wink, wink), he abuses public funds to prevent his wife from becoming the mark of a sleazy pickup artist and to save his son from becoming a white rapper. Meanwhile, his already complicated domestic situation becomes increasingly entangled with a black market arms deal involving rebels from an unnamed French-speaking Arab country but which is probably, given the date of release, Algeria.
What we have here is Acts Two and Three of the seventy-one acts that make up James Cameron’s True Lies (1994). While the Cameron film is an action movie, The Jackpot! is first and foremost a comedy. I am sad to report that at no point in the runtime does Lhermitte chase down a suspect through a hotel while riding a horse. Instead, he bugs a prostitute’s hotel room and fast-forwards through a video of her daily routine in order to identify one of her clients. Otherwise, however, Cameron makes a perfect scan of the major plot points, so much so that it’s pretty easy to identify the seams where he has grafted the talky French comedy into a more traditional Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. Even some of the gags—intended to cover up the dearth of action—have made it into the Cameron film.
That bit where Jamie Lee Curtis drops the machine gun down a flight of stairs, and it takes out half the bad guys? That came from The Jackpot! So did True Lies’ thick veneer of racism and misogyny. The scene where Schwarzenegger forces Curtis to dance for him is closer to straight-up rape in the original, impeded only by the terrorists showing up to usher in Act Three. That act, where Lhermitte and his wife (Miou-Miou) must thwart a bombing in the heart of Paris, has an additional ick factor beyond its ambient racism. In July 1995, a terrorist group briefly exported the Algerian Civil War to the Paris metro, killing eight people. This, strictly speaking, is not the film’s fault, but it does leave something of a sour taste in retrospect.
The Bélier Family (La famille Bélier, Éric Lartigau, 2014)
For all the faults of this past year’s CODA (a movie so bad it was nominated for Best Picture), one that often goes unmentioned is that it is practically a shot-for-shot remake of an eight-year-old French film, The Bélier Family, which took the French world by storm in 2014. It served as a spotlight for the talents of singer Louane Emera on the eve of the debut of her first album. The rather problematic way of highlighting this talent was to make the rest of her fictional family Deaf. And, just as the arms dealers in The Jackpot! were not played by actual Algerian terrorists, Louane’s parents and brother are not played by Deaf actors. Even in France, where representational issues are not at the forefront of public consciousness, this caused a firestorm of controversy. This is one thing CODA changed, and for the better. Shit, it’s CODA’s raison d’être.
For the third time in a row, the remake depends heavily on the original with only cosmetic changes. Farming is replaced by fishing, Paris is replaced by Boston, and “La Marseillaise” is replaced by, uh, “Happy Birthday to You.” Pretty much everything else is the same, from the bawdy jokes about the parents’ sexuality to the emotional climax where the main character (Emilia Jones in CODA) signs to her family while belting out her audition to enter a prestigious music school. In addition to using Deaf actors, CODA changes two things for the better. First, it does not pretend that the main character, who is about to graduate high school, is just now getting her period (in CODA, the equivalent scene features her parents loudly having sex). It also does not include a scene where her brother passes out from a latex allergy. Instead… I actually don’t remember what happens in CODA. A bar brawl or something?
On the other hand, the character of the music teacher is handled much better in The Bélier Family. In CODA he is a quirky inspirational Stand and Deliver type. In the French film, he is simply a misanthrope, cruelly dismissing students who can’t sing from his music class. His pivotal meeting with Louane’s parents late in the film is the first time he learns that her family is Deaf, a piece of information the CODA character knows from the beginning, robbing this scene of its power. Another interesting cultural note: the teacher is coded as gay in CODA, though a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot shows he has a wife and child; in Bélier he is actually gay, though also revealed in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot.
Both films are middlebrow pablum and as such are practically interchangeable. If I had to pick one, though… Look, Louane is a professional singer, and Emilia Jones is not. Maybe my Gallic side is showing, but I much prefer Louane’s rendition of Michel Sardou’s “Je vole” to Jones’ rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.”
Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. He received his doctorate in “Languages, History, and Literature of the Ancient World from the Beginning until Late Antiquity” and is currently investigating Aramaic translations of the Bible. He is supremely unqualified to talk about film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.
Bad French Cinema Index
Part 1: French Films with Famous Remakes
Part 2: French Animation
Part 3: Serial (Bad) Weddings
Part 4: Live-Action Fairy Tales
Part 5: The Tuche Family
Part 6: Asterix and Obelix