Think of a newspaper strip cartoon which regularly depicts, in a farcical manner, humorous and almost always sexy incidents from the lives of the citizens living in a modern Parisian suburb. Then visualise these incidents not being drawn with cartoon characters, but filmed with live actors and displayed as very short daily vignettes on a Parisian TV program rather than in a newspaper. I do not know whether this film had any such antecedents, or whether it was first written and produced for cinematic release as a feature film, but it has no message and appears to be little more than an often very amusing collection of such vignettes. The thin thread linking these vignettes is that they show a series of incidents arising from the competing attempts by a married but feuding couple (who plan to divorce as soon as possible) to win a large cash reward which has been offered to either of them in return for the location of a missing man.
Is the film successful? This is probably best judged by how you would assess success for such a newspaper cartoon - the normal standards used in judging feature films do not seem very appropriate here. Many people turn to their newspaper cartoons for a light chuckle before they even look at the headlines, others never even 'see' this part of their paper, any more than they do the advertisements - regarding both as irrelevant and present only out of economic necessity. For the former group this is likely to be a very popular and successful film - the latter group are unlikely to even be aware of its existence, and in both cases this would be exactly what the film makers expected. It is certainly not a great film which will have critics raving as it unabashedly exploits as many different sexual situations as possible; but it is pure comedy as these situations have all been designed to be amusing rather than erotic. I felt that it was reasonably competently made, and it has no doubt brought a little welcome humour into the lives of many of those who have seen it. We cannot really expect any more than this, although we are still not likely to award the resulting film many bouquets. But then again all it would be likely to ask of us is to enjoy ourselves and avoid throwing brickbats!.
