2000 French comedy, first movie of Agnès Jaoui.

Bacri/Jaoui

Agnès Jaoui plays a secondary role in this movie. She was real life partner for 25 years of Jean-Pierre Bacri, who plays the main character. Jaoui wrote the script and Bacri wrote the dialogues. It's a really a Bacri-Jaoui "couple" work. Jean Pierre Bacri passed away in 2021.

The are/were quite engaged politically, on subjects like migrants, ecology, intermittent employees in media industry, etc.

Themes

The project started as a police/gangster film, but Bacri/Jaoui felt it would not work. So they kept several characters and shifted to a comedy, centred about the themes of bias and contempt.

Jaoui wanted to make a movie with many characters ("film choral" or "Hyperlink cinema", so they added a lot more secondary characters, treating them with some depth.

Both Bacri & Jaoui are primarily actors, and they chose other popular French actors with whom they already worked with appreciate. The spirit of "camaraderie"/friendship among actors can be felt and works very well.

Style

Close to Alain Resnais (Bacri/Jaoui worked with him eg. in Smoking/No smoking) and Claude Sautet. The social class themes are also common in Jean Renoir ("The Rule of the game"), Mankiewicz, Lubitsch, or Woody Allen.

Jaoui preferred for her first movie a minimalistic shooting style, and gave more importance to dialogues and acting.

Critical and public reception

Success: nationally and internationally, public and critical. 4 Césars and nominated for the Oscar for the best foreign language movie.

The comical devices are mainly around the opposition between social and cultural classes.

Despite the sarcastic tone and the mockery made of their characters, what makes this comedy stand out is the general empathy that's shown all across the board.