La Rançon de la gloire (2015)
Directed by Xavier Beauvois

Film Review

After the bleak and intensely involving drama Des hommes et des Dieux (2010), director Xavier Beauvois could be forgiven for wanting to change tack and try something in a much lighter vein.  So, having dealt with one real life incident which attracted considerable media coverage (the abduction and murder of seven French Cistercian monks in the mid-1990s), Beauvois turns his attention to another - the theft of Charlie Chaplin's coffin by a pair of unemployed immigrants in 1978.  The comic possibilities would seem to be endless but Beauvois, unused to comedy (this being his first flirtation with the genre) and perhaps too in awe of Chaplin to risk anything too disrespectful, downplays the humour to the point where it is barely discernible and as a result he delivers a pretty anaemic film that comes across as a poor man's homage to arguably cinema's greatest comedy giant.

La Rancon de la gloire is full of good intentions and, equipped with a talented duo in the lead roles (Roschdy Zem and Benoît Poelvoorde), it is moderately entertaining and deserves some credit for reviving interest in Chaplin's work.  Good intentions do not, however, make a good film and this one is patently lacking both punch and depth, so that it works neither as a vaudevillian divertissement nor as a social realist drama - the genres that Chaplin himself married so successfully but which this film fails dismally to bring together.  Beauvois's attempts to connect the theft and ransoming of Chaplin's coffin with the great man's work and life are laboured to the point of absurdity and include a subplot set in a circus (a reference to Chaplin's origins as a comic performer) that is completely superfluous and merely drags out the film to an unjustifiably long runtime.

Rather than stick to documented fact, Beauvois recasts the pathetic individuals who stole the coffin (two unemployed East Europeans) as crude approximations to Chaplin's famous Tramp, with a phoney back story that would have us believe that the crime was motivated by altruistic rather than selfish motives (to raise money to pay for a wife's hospital treatment and a daughter's education).  This isn't so much a case of poetic licence as an easy way for Beauvois to slip in some obvious allusions to Chaplin's The Kid (1921) and Modern Times (1936).  Rather than take the facts and develop the narrative from these, Beauvois starts out with the objective of making a Chaplin homage and adjusts the facts accordingly, changing not only the names of the protagonists, but also their nationality for no apparent reason.

An over-the-top score from veteran composer Michel Legrand does little to enhance the film and becomes ludicrously operatic in some scenes, although the inclusion of familiar motifs from Limelight and City Lights does pack the emotional punch that Beauvois fails to get by more honest means.  Often cast (as he is here) as the hangdog loser with a gentle heart, Benoît Poelvoorde is probably the nearest thing that francophone cinema has to Chaplin today, so he is well placed to carry the film as a distinctly Chaplinesque rogue, imaginatively (and effectively) partnered with Roschdy Zem, who provides the grit to balance his co-stars whimsy.  One of Chaplin's sons Eugène (a circus impresario in real life) appears in the aforementioned circus digression and Peter Coyote gives most value in the supporting cast as the Chaplins' fastidious butler.

For a comedy, laughs are few and far between, with the humour mostly confined to the part of the film in which the enterprising coffin snatchers attempt to extort money from the bereaved relatives.  For the sequence in which Poelvoorde and Zem dig up the coffin, one that is ripe with comic potential, Beauvois films it as he would a straight documentary, in a completely detached and disinterested manner.  It's a brave decision but it underscores what is fundamentally wrong with La Rancon de la gloire - the film seeks to pay tribute to Chaplin but it resolutely refuses to enter his world.  There are allusions and clips galore, but the spirit of Chaplin is conspicuous by its absence.  All that Beauvois has gained by making this film is to show that he has no real flair for comedy.

Film Synopsis

On leaving prison in December 1977, Eddy is greeted by his old friend, Osman, who has agreed to give him a place to stay at his modest home in Vevey, a small town on the banks of Lake Geneva.  In return, Eddy will look after Osman's seven year old daughter Samira and help with her education whilst her mother is in hospital.  With Christmas coming, Osman badly needs money to pay for his wife's hip operation, and this is where Eddy comes to his aid with a seemingly foolproof plan.  Charlie Chaplin has just been buried not far from where they live.  All they have to do is to steal the coffin and hide it where no one can find it.  Chaplin's relatives, who are no doubt still grieving his loss, will be sure to hand over whatever they demand.  It's a plan that cannot fail...