Comment épouser un premier ministre (1964)
Directed by Michel Boisrond

Film Review

One of the wettest and most unbearable French comedies of the 1960s, Comment epouser un premier ministre must surely have been a career low point for its stars, Jean-Claude Brialy and Pascal Petit.  It is typical of the mundane so-called comedy fare served up with alarming regularity by director Michel Boisrond during this decade, often the lamest attempts to imitate British and American film comedies with high profile stars mercilessly sacrificed for the sake of a quick buck.  Brigitte Bardot had been the willing sacrificial victim in several of Boisrond's previous films - Cette sacrée gamine (1955), Une Parisienne (1957), Voulez-vous danser avec moi? (1959).  Now it was the turn of Pascal Petit and that darling of the French New Wave, Jean-Claude Brialy.  It would have been kinder to feed live new-born lambs through a wood chipper.

Filmed in luxuriant widescreen and vibrant colour, Comment epouser un premier ministre looks sumptuous compared with most French film comedies of this time, but this extravagant surface gloss can scarcely make up for the depressing lack of substance - a ridiculously anodyne plot that goes nowhere, characters that are so two-dimensional they might as well have been played by cardboard cut-outs, direction that is totally lack in imagination, and performances that make this whole ghastly package the most effective soporific money can buy.  Heaven knows what induced an actor of Brialy's calibre to put his name to this mouldering monolith to mediocrity - he looks more like a man grudgingly serving a prison sentence for a crime he did not commit than someone happily earning his pay cheque as a comic actor.  Only someone with a superhuman boredom threshold could sit through this ghastly comedy misfire from start to finish without falling asleep.  This is torture, not entertainment.

Film Synopsis

Philippe Lambert tries not to let his tendency to be an inveterate womaniser interfere with his professional duties as a ministerial attaché.  If only he wasn't so good looking, so incredibly irresistible to the opposite sex!  Naturally, his immediate superior is jealous of his amorous reputation and passes up no occasion to make life difficult for him.  This is how Lambert ends up having to take the place of the Prime Minister at a gala evening at the opera, a loathsome chore.  That fateful evening, Lambert has the misfortune to lose a letter sent to him by one of his female admirers, a woman who is married to a man of some importance.  The letter is discovered by a girl who works at the opera, Marion, and she is quick to turn this to her advantage.  She arranges a meeting with Lambert and threatens to create a scandal unless he intervenes to prevent her family from being evicted from their apartment.  Before he knows it, Lambert is being coerced into halting the construction of another building adjacent to Marion's and putting in its place a public swimming pool...