Cyprien (2009)
Directed by David Charhon

Film Review

Cyprien has to be just about the silliest and most pointless Jekyll and Hyde rehash that has so far been committed to celluloid.  It's effectively a lazy remake of the classic Jerry Lewis comedy The Nutty Professor (1963), but with none of that film's entertainment value and with all of its irritating qualities.  It's just a dreary dumb comedy that tries desperately to be funny and ends up looking about as funny as an outbreak of bubonic plague in an orphanage.

This atrocity was directed (if that is le mot juste) by David Charhon, and the fact that it his first feature is glaringly apparent in just about every second of its life-sapping 100 minute runtime.  Charhon's background is in making advertising films and video games, and you can probably guess that from the film's eye-slapping visuals, which give it the look and feel of an overdone TV ad for a well-known brand of - well, whichever commodity you care to name.  Having cut his teeth on this debut disaster, Charhon would go on to have much greater success with his next film, the far superior De l'autre côté du périph (2012).

Cyprien's main failing is that it lacks a sympathetic central character.  Even more so than Jerry Lewis's hideous portrayal in his film, Élie Semoun is nothing more than the most abject form of caricature - you get physically sick of looking at him within five minutes.  Why Semoun didn't tone down his performance to make his character more sympathetic and believable is hard to fathom.  He has already shown himself to be a very capable actor - in such films as Philippe Collin's Aux abois (2005) - but here is just the worst kind of comedy grotesque, even more unbearable than he was in L'Élève Ducobu (2011).

The rest of the cast - which contains some remarkable talent - is equally ill-served by this film.  Catherine Deneuve at least appears vaguely convincing as the regal head of a fashion magazine, but Laurent Stocker and Léa Drucker look as comfortable in this film as the Pope would be in a Parisian brothel (well, the present Pope at least).  Even if Semoun had been minded to try a more subtle approach rather than resort to the most egregious imitation of a computer geek it is hard to see how the film could have managed to be much more than the crudest form of entertainment.  The screenwriters are obviously working to the assumption that the film's audience has an aggregate IQ in the low teens, and the director seems to be pathologically incapable of differentiating humour from the most annoying kind of silliness.  Cyprien isn't content to be merely bad - it is completely unbearable.

Film Synopsis

Cyprien may be in his mid-thirties but he remains the timid adolescent, addicted to computer games and constantly mocked by his colleagues at the fashion magazine company for which he works as an IT technician.  He spends all of his life with computers but inwardly he pines for the woman of his dreams.  What chance does a geek like him have of getting off with the adorable Gina McQueen, his ideal soul mate?  When Cyprien loses his job it looks as if he has lost everything.  But then he lays his hands on a deodorant that magically turns him into a cool dude that no woman can resist.  It looks as if Cyprien's dreams are about to come true - but there is a catch.  His transformation is only temporary...