Fantasia chez les ploucs (1971)
Directed by Gérard Pirès

Film Review

Gérard Pirès followed up his deliriously eccentric debut feature Erotissimo (1968), an uninhibited sideswipe at the advertising industry, with an even more unbridled kind of free-format comedy, although this time the obvious lack of anything vaguely resembling a storyline to hold it all together results in a film that is a tedious muddle rather than an inspired anarchic romp.  Fantasia chez les ploucs is loosely based on Charles Williams's pulp fiction crime novel The Diamond Bikini, first published in 1956.  Ten years on, Williams's idiosyncratic brand of noir fiction would have a far more successful brush with French cinema - as the inspiration for François Truffaut's swansong Vivement dimanche! (1983).  Marcel Ophüls's Peau de banane (1963) is another notable French adaptation of the American crime writer's work.

Not content with Charles Williams's own brand of humour, Pirès overloads the film with his own somewhat more puerile idea of comedy.  As a result, the film ends up as a haphazard deluge of madcap situations that looks like the result of a horrible collision between Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965) and several mashed together episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard.   Pirès clearly has some kind of fetish about burning wheel tyre and trashing motor vehicles in the most spectacular way imaginable (in this respect the film looks like a dry run for his subsequent not-so-environmentally friendly romp Taxi (1998)), and apparently no interest whatsoever in little things like characterisation or telling a story that makes some kind of sense.  Fantasia chez les ploucs is the most gloriously scattergun kind of French comedy, and you'd almost swear that everyone involve in its production was suffering from a chronic case of attention deficit disorder - either that or just two many liquid lunches.

The film was deluged with lousy reviews when it first came out and yet it still managed to attract a fairly impressive audience of 1.4 million in France - although this was almost certainly down to the calibre of the cast that Pirès somehow lured on board.  The fact that the film boasted two of the big beasts of French cinema in the early 1970s - Jean Yanne and Lino Ventura - made it an easy sell, and with the addition of a scantily clad Mireille Darc at her most seductively sensual it was probably too good to miss.  Suffice it to say that this irresistible triumvirate is just about all that the film has going for it.  Even with a respectable supporting cast (Georges Demestre, Jacques Dufilho, Rufus), none of the secondary characters has any impact, and even the the principals are fighting a losing battle to make their characters more than just the silliest kind of comicbook clots.

The chemistry between Yanne and Ventura is the one reward the film offers in return for its relentless dross, and you can't help wishing the two actors had been better served by the script - particularly as this was their one and only big screen pairing.  Watch closely and you'll be surprised to catch a glimpse of Alain Delon (Darc's real-life partner at the time) in a cameo role. Awful though the film is, Fantasia chez les ploucs does have some nostalgia value.  It is stuffed to the eyeballs with the counterculture craziness of the era in which it was made and is helped by a suitably hip avant-garde score from the Dutch band Ekseption, who were very much in vogue at the time.  None of this prevents the film from being a Grade A turkey, though.  After Gérard Pirès's remarkable debut feature it was a spectacular descent into sub-mediocrity.

Film Synopsis

Sagamore Noonan is the owner of a small farm in the southern United States, although his main preoccupation is distilling whisky illegally, which he tries to keep from the attention of the local sheriff.  He lives with his brother Doc Noonan, a ruined bookmaker, Billy, his eight-year old nephew, and Noé, an eccentric uncle who is building a ship to survive the end of the world.  One day, a strange couple, Caroline and her Uncle Simeon, turn up on the farm, looking for a place to stay for a day or two.  These two are in fact a pair of diamond thieves, and their latest haul of jewels is concealed in Caroline's bikini.  It isn't long before the Noonan brothers have some more unexpected guests, all eager to get their hands on Caroline's leisure wear...