ADIEU LES CONS / BYE BYE MORONS (2020)

Easy to see why this shaggy dog of a movie earned big bucks & major awards in France.  The film, from writer/director/lead actor Albert Dupontel, is rude, silly, fun & appalling in the rough manner of sophisticated French slapstick.  (Did I mention rude?)  And it’s just as easy to see why it didn’t get Stateside distribution.  That cruelly goofy tone lost at the Old & New World border on a story that opens with a fatal diagnosis for salon owner Virginia Efira, doomed to die from some auto-immune disease after decades of breathing in toxic fumes at work.  And she has unfinished personal business to attend to: a ‘lost’ son given up in a teenage adoption.  After a complicated bit of narrative obfuscation, Efira is joined on the hunt by middle-aged A.I. whiz Dupontel, himself about to be replaced at work by younger/cheaper hires, and by blind company researcher Nicolas Marié, styled to look like Dr. Strangelove.  Together, these three will follow an unlikely path to a successful finish, but cause enough damage & suspicion along the way to have the entire city police force hunt them down.  Best when Marié revels in blind-man’s-bluff gags where he’s the butt of painful disability slapstick rarely seen since the heyday of W.C. Fields.*  Dupontel won Best Director awards on this, but, no Blake Edwards he, he’s forced to chop up too many gags that beg to be played in one.*  The first half of the film, setting up the situation and inter-personal relationships, a bit of an over-edited mess.  But you tumble to it.  And the leads are all so damn likable you hope for them to have their fondest hopes fulfilled.  It makes the left-hand turn toward THELMA AND LOUISE at the end feel particularly desperate & unearned.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Fields & the blind customer is in IT’S A GIFT/’33.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/its-gift-1933.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The rule is, write-up the film at hand, not the film you wish you were watching.  Nevertheless, the ‘fix’ to the ending is too obvious not to offer.  Mom’s auto-immune illness?  Only possible cure a bone marrow transplant.  But since she has no relatives . . . Wait!  What about that ‘lost’ son.  Voila!  Now we’re Hollywood remake ready.