Review of Les chômeurs en folie

This being said, the odds were against me since it is virtually impossible to see this film, which was not released theatrically. I have managed to get a copy of the videotape, and although I had been waiting to see this film for a long time, I barely could watch it through. How to describe this clueless mess ? First it was shot in lavish 16 mm, atrociously under-lit and with absolutely no sense of frame. Second terrible thing : no direct sound seems to have been recorded during the filming, so all sounds have been overdubbed in studio, and the result is just awful. Chee, one of the two main actors, overdoes his (pathetic) act, and Foley artists seem to have only had their hands to reproduce all the needed sounds... But this would be nothing if the film was actually a film. Instead, it is vaguely a series of scenes hardly attached to each other, depicting the misbehaving of two unemployed youngsters, small (very small)-time crooks who think they're hitting it big when they put a hand on a camera and decide to direct a feature film. No need to go further into this... plot, the main interest of this film, for french viewers at least, being the appearance, for their first roles, of now stars Didier Bourdon and Smaïn. Didier Bourdon actually knew how to act, he is almost OK in his character, a young baron attracted by the sunlights a movie could cast over him. As for Smaïn, he only has one scene, where he plays another unemployed young crook. This being said, the film has a political and somewhat sociological background, since it begins with the Champs-Elysées parade that followed the Mitterrand 1981 election. With the invasion of the aristocratic world by André and Lucien and the evocation of the rise of new free radio stations, the director takes a look at the renewal of young energies such as they were being felt in 1981. Thus Les chômeurs en folie is not a reactionary film (what it could have been), but more a "fashionable" desperate try to make a film about contemporary society phenomenons. No need to say that 25 years later, it is so dated that it could almost be used by sociologists to study the french youth of 1981. Of course, the film fails all along the way to provoke even the smallest smirk, and this despite every running gag, every mini skirt and every nude breast Georges Cachoux conscientiously compiled.