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The
Visitors
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I am unsure what most local filmgoers will expect The Visitors to be once they have heard it is "the biggest comedy hit in French history". An urbane, erotic farce like French Twist (1995)? A vigorous social satire like Rules of the Game (1939)? A string of elegant visual gags in the style of Jacques Tati? Let me offer a comparative guide. It is best, if contemplating a visit to The Visitors, to gear one's moviegoing recollections to Sex and Zen (1991) from Hong Kong, the British surfing film Blue Juice (1995), or perhaps an American number such as Father of the Bride 2 (1995). In other words, broad, crude, resolutely lowbrow comedies that flail about and miss their mark rather more often than they hit it. The Visitors is an example of utterly mainstream French cinema, something we rarely see in Australia. (Just as, of course, we never see the "biggest comedy hits" from Greece, Iran, India or a myriad of other countries.) It is not hard to see why such import business is a slow trickle: despite a tortuous attempt to make the sub-titles of this film as witty as possible, something seems to have been irremediably lost in the passage from France to Australia. (There was later an American remake using some of the original personnel: Just Visiting [2001].) It is not only verbal jokes that suffer, but the entire comic mood. From its first frantic moments, The Visitors is a clanking, irritating, desperate piece of would-be burlesque. Director Jean-Marie Poiré instructs every actor to jerk, twitch and pull silly faces at all times, pausing only to collide with or destroy any prop in sight. The film uses a time-travel premise that is far removed from the ingenious complexities and convolutions of the Back to the Future or Bill and Ted movies. Fierce knight Godefroy (Jean Reno) and his grotty servant Jacquart (Christian Clavier) find themselves transported from 1123 to the present day, thanks to the faulty potion of a wizard. They encounter their descendants, and endeavour to find their way back in time, in a world that has altered its priorities enormously since the French Revolution. There are stretches when this film generates a certain manic intensity and sustains it through a string of varied gags. The physical, scatological humour of the piece (concerning smelly feet, baths, toilets, food and farts) works much better than the endless harping on the behavioural affectations of the genteel classes. And Reno is a delightful actor with an enormous range: his face suits quizzical comedies just as well as hard-boiled action movies like The Professional (aka Leon, 1994). Like American time-travel movies, The Visitors ties itself in an odd ideological knot: it exudes feverish nostalgia for a mythical, conservative past, while congratulating the progressive, enlightened values of the present. But any such ideas are mere spin-offs from the rough comic business that presents itself at any turn. And, in the annals of popular French burlesque, this one cannot hold a candle to the long-ago Jean-Paul Belmondo farce, That Man From Rio (1964). © Adrian Martin October 1996 |
