Went to the cinema club tonight to see the French comedy SUPERCONDRIAQUE (Hypochondriac) Starring the French comedian Dany Boon. It is the follow up comedy to the massive French hit Bienvenue chez les Chtis. That film had a good premise about a post office manager who bends the work rules and is then banished from his good life near the cote dazur to the rainy far north of France alongside the Belgian border. The culture shock is well done, and the characters have a reality about them. However, in the latest from the same stable we have the tale of a 40 year old male virgin who takes photos for a medical magazine, but then suspects that he is developing all the illnesses he has depicted. Furthermore, he suffers from OCD . These elements lend themselves to much slapstick humour and visual gags. (One scene where he covertly gives himself a body-scan is a real gem) Trouble is, the joke soon runs thin, and so they write in a draggy diversion where his long-suffering GP takes him to a Medicin sans frontier style camp . This leads the film into parodies of various movie genres, but one is fully aware that the ideas had run out and they are struggling to fill a 2 hour slot. None of the characters are rounded or believable, and the script was so banal that even I could understand much of it without even having to resort to the Dutch subtitles. Current French movie-making seems to be gleefully plunging down-market, almost deliberately shrugging off its Nouvelle vague reputation for style and content. To me, it appears that Italian film-makers are the ones doing the best work nowadays. I only hung on until the end of this one so that I could deliver in my verdict card. I classed it as zeer slecht (Very poor) ..but seeing as it did make me laugh a few times early on, I will give it 3/10.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 23:37:54 +0000
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