Hibernatus (1969)
Directed by Edouard Molinaro

Film Review

Edouard Molinaro's first collaboration with Louis de Funès on the 1967 hit comedy Oscar had not been an amiable experience, either for the director or his leading man.  Despite this, Molinaro allowed himself to be talked by Gaumont into directing a second film with the temperamental comedy giant, although this was to be their final collaboration.  Like Oscar, Hibernatus was an adaptation of a successful comic stage play and was skilfully adapted by Jean Halain and Jacques Vilfrid, who scripted many of de Funès's films.

Despite its impressive production values and a superior screenplay, Hibernatus only managed to attract an audience of 3.4 million, an impressive result but way below the audience size that de Funès regularly notched up in the 1960s and '70s.  By this stage in his career, following the phenomenal success of Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez (1964) and Fantômas (1964), Louis de Funès was established as the most popular comic actor in France, a status he would continue to enjoy for more than another decade.  Hibernatus is a perfect vehicle for de Funès's persona and style of comedy - once again he is cast as a mean-spirited businessman who fails to cope with the myriad calamities that he brings on himself.

The talented comedienne Claude Gensac had the honour of playing de Funès's on-screen wife the previous year in Le Gendarme se marie (1968), so it was only fitting that in Hibernatus she should play his wife again, once more providing her co-star with the perfect comedy foil.  De Funès managed to persuade the production team to cast his son Olivier in the role of his son in the film.  Olivier de Funès cropped up in a number of his father's films (Le Grand Restaurant, L'Homme orchestre, Sur un arbre perché), but evidently he had no real enthusiasm for the career he was pushed into by his father.  Turning his back on acting in 1971, he pursued a career in aviation and ended up as an airline captain for Air France.

Film Synopsis

The well-ordered world of Hubert de Tartas, manager of a successful packaging company, is suddenly turned upside-down when his wife Edmée's grandfather, Paul Fournier, makes an unexpected return.  Sixty-five years after his ship collided with an iceberg near the North Pole, Fournier's body is discovered preserved in a block of ice.  Professor Loriebat, a world authority on artificially induced hibernation, takes an immediate interest in the discovery and succeeds in bringing Fournier back to life, as a spry 25-year-old.

Anxious that his wife's grandfather should not end up as an object of scientific study, Hubert de Tartas arranges for him to be abducted from the hospital where he is recuperating and taken to his large family residence.  Realising that Fournier risks being killed by the shock of finding himself in another age, Hubert and Edmée agree that the safest course is to let him believe that the year is 1905.  Keeping up the deception that Fournier is still in the Belle Époque proves to a far greater challenge than his well-meaning descendents imagine, particularly when the Modern Lazarus is convinced that Hubert is his own philandering father...