15 août (2001)
Directed by Patrick Alessandrin

Film Review

15 août, Patrick Alessandrin's second film, starts well enough, and offers so much with its distinguished trio of lead actors Berry, Berling and Darroussin.  However, all too quickly the characters are reduced to familiar stereotypes and the narrative becomes stale, throwing up situations which have been done before - and better - in previous films of this genre.  This is not to deny that the film does have entertainment value, with some great comic moments.  Its main fault is that is doesn't seem to offer anything new or even dare to challenge the conventional views of what men do and think.  The washing machine sequence is a case in point.  For once, it would be so nice to see a male character do the household laundry without causing some comic book domestic disaster… This is how women like to think of men: utterly useless about the home and driven by one or two primitive urges. The image is an amusing one, but it is fast becoming out-of-date. Most men watching this self-consciously 'intelligent' film will be appalled by the shallow, stereotypical way in which they are portrayed.

Film Synopsis

One summer, the spouses of three women girlfriends meet up at their rented holiday home in the sunny coastal resort of La Baule and have a nasty surprise waiting for them.  This August, their wives have decided to go off on their own for a fortnight to enjoy themselves, leaving the men with the delights of spending their summer holidays looking after their overactive offspring.  Of the three, Max is the one who is most annoyed by this turn of events.  He had been planning to walk out on his wife and move in with his mistress.  Now he finds himself stuck in a holiday shack with two men in his own predicament and a stepdaughter who is too precocious by half.  Raoul has managed to get off lightly - he only has his dog to look after.  Meanwhile, Vincent is as big a child as the children he is trying, and failing, to bring up.  As the days pass, domesticity clearly doesn't suit any of the three men and when they finally discover the reason for their wives' new bout of independence they start to wonder if they will ever return...