LE BONHEUR EST DANS LE PRE (58)

Directed by: Etienne Chatiliez

Starring: Michel Serrault, Eddy Mitchell, Sabine Azema, Carmen Maura

The Pitch: An unhappily married middle-aged man sees a family looking for their long-lost father on a tabloid TV show and (being a doppelganger for the missing man) steps into his shoes.

Theo Sez: From the opening scene, in which a factory-owner tries to quell a riotous mob of angry workers while his weirdly over-affectionate best friend calls him "Bunny Rabbit" and tries to give him his birthday present, this is both quietly hilarious and deeply strange. A kind of SOMMERSBY (or RETURN OF MARTIN GUERRE) in reverse - the returning husband knowing he's a fake, but his wife accepting him for who he claims to be - it also borrows from Bertrand Blier's films a gleeful political incorrectness verging on misogyny (seems what women really want is rough talk, great sex and the occasional belting) and gives it all the easy-going, rather disjointed quality of this director's LIFE IS A LONG, QUIET RIVER. It's entertaining, but the attitudes are bizarre - especially as regards the aforementioned best friend, an earthy extrovert who's apparently so "life-loving" he'll paw anything that moves : he represents the film's convivial spirit - take life as it comes, and enjoy all its sensual pleasures (exemplified, as per the title, in a life close to Nature and away from urban pettiness) - but he's also a little scary, so attached to his pleasures he's intolerant of those who don't share them. He's a stereotype of bull-headed, larger-than-life Frenchness (what de Gaulle might've been like had he been a car salesman), and perhaps this is a movie that you have to be French to really appreciate ; certainly you'd be hard-pressed to find a Hollywood comedy where the characters spend so much time eating and drinking.