Le Miraculé (1987)
Directed by Jean-Pierre Mocky

Film Review

After a pretty lacklustre decade, Jean-Pierre Mocky scored a palpable hit with this ribald comedy which goes after those who profit from the credulity of others with the savagery of a half-starved Rottweiler.  Le Miraculé has a bad reputation in some quarters, as it is perceived as a direct attack on religious faith in general, Catholicism in particular.  In the face of such criticism, Mocky went out of his way to make clear this was not his intention.  Like his earlier film, Un drôle de paroissien (1963), Le Miraculé condemns not believers, but those who exploit believers for their own cynical ends.  The film begins with a pretty sour reminder of what Lourdes has become, a hideously kitsch Catholic theme park where mass-produced effigies of the Virgin Mary are piled high on every neon-lit street amid all manner of related paraphernalia waiting for a devout Catholic with a large purse and dearth of good taste.   Jessica Hausner's Lourdes (2009) makes the same grim observation, albeit far more subtly.

In common with all too much of Mocky's output, Le Miraculé is a lively but extremely uneven film, tending painfully to vulgarity in places whilst being outrageously funny in others.  On the plus side, the film boasts a superb cast, with Michel Serrault and Jean Poiret teaming up one last time, bringing to an end their partnership which began in the early 1950s.  In what is effectively a silent role (as he plays a Harpo Marx-style mute who can only communicate by whistling and making weird farmyard noises) Serrault turns in one of the funniest performances of his career, showing that in addition to his other accomplishments he was also a superlative visual comedian.  It is interesting to note that the roles taken by Poiret and Serrault had originally been conceived for Michel Blanc and Coluche; the latter had agreed to appear in the film shortly before he died in a road accident in 1986.
 
Jeanne Moreau gives just as much value as her male co-stars in a rare comedic role, gleefully sending up the kind of perverse and conflicted femme fatale roles she has played in the past, earning herself a well-deserved Best Actress César nomination as she does so. Among the more inspired gags is one in which Moreau enters a 'state of the art' confessional booth (effectively a payphone to the Almighty, complete with recorded message) and gets cut off in mid confession when her allotted three minutes are up.  What the film's three hugely talented leads (ably supported by an admirable supporting cast) do to Mocky's rambling screenplay is itself something of a minor miracle, a kind of Lazarus resurrection that breathes life into a project that could so easily have been a stillborn disaster, strangled at its inception by its own chaotic silliness.  The sheer abundance of enjoyably daft comic situations, enthusiastically handled by a committed cast, provides a convenient distraction from the vacuous comic-book plot, and whilst the director's penchant for tacky vulgarity diminishes the film's comic potential, Le Miraculé still manages to be one of Jean-Pierre Mocky's more consistently enjoyable films.  Ever the agent provocateur, Mocky chose to release the film on 18th February, the date on which the Virgin Mary is reputed to have presented herself to Saint Bernadette...

Film Synopsis

Papu, an unscrupulous peddler, is selling balloons one evening when he is run over by a car.  Pretending he has lost the use of his legs, he hopes to profit from an insurance claim, but he has no desire to remain a pretend invalid for the rest of his life.  With the help of Sabine, a former prostitute who has become an obsessive Catholic and charity worker, he will undertake a pilgrimage to Lourdes, where he will make a miraculous recovery.  When insurance agent Plombie uncovers this scam, he sends his mute colleague Roland Fox-Terrier after Papu, with the aim of exposing Papu before the supposed miracle can take place...