Let My People Go! (2011)
Directed by Mikael Buch

Film Review

If anyone was minded to offer an award for the most original French film comedy of 2011 it would surely have gone to this deliriously camp but effortlessly enjoyable debut feature from Mikael Buch.  Taking his cue from his idol, Pedro Almodóvar, Buch borrows a familiar theme - a totally mixed-up young man's quest for identity - and hammers it into a boisterous comedy that is bizarrely true to life, in spite of its wild comic excesses and über-kitsch patina.  Buch himself describes Let My People Go! as a musical comedy without songs, and this is how it appears, stylistically heavily influenced by the films of Jacques Demy and those great Hollywood musicals of the 1950s.  Like Almodóvar, Buch cannot prevent himself from referencing the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, films that were once considered shallow spinster trash but which are now highly regarded for their remarkably perceptive analysis of individuals struggling to find their true nature within a rule-bound society that is as repressed as it is hypocritical.

Mikael Buch probably isn't in the same league as Sirk and Almodóvar, but going by this first film he certainly shows great promise, able to  develop complex themes within a seemingly frivolous and lightweight narrative.  The central protagonist may be a Jewish gay man with a worrying Romy Schneider complex, but his burgeoning pre-mid-life crisis (exacerbated by a family that turns out to be even more dysfunctional than he had thought) is something we can all readily identify with. With its garishly kitsch visuals, eccentric comic excursions and gay-themed romantic subplot which is so corny it hurts, Let My People Go! risks being fringe fodder, the kind of film that might, in time, acquire a cult following but at the cost of being lost forever to the mainstream.  Yet by dealing with universal themes in such an honest and humorous way, by pumping genuine human feeling into the narrative to make it real and meaningful (often when you least expect it), Buch ensures that his film has broad appeal and will reward even the most demanding of moviegoers. And there is probably not a lifeform on the planet that could watch the shopping channel sequence featuring an aerosol that instantly converts Gentiles into Jews without collapsing in hysterics.

It says something of Buch's potential that he was able to attract such a distinguished cast for his first full-length film.  So home is she in the world of Pedro Almodóvar that Carmen Maura was probably the obvious casting choice for the main female role, that of the hero's feisty mother.  Maura's acting skills are hardly stretched to breaking point but the film gives her ample scope to prove her worth as a great comic actress.  Equally committed, and just as funny, is an enjoyably over-the-top Jean-Luc Bideau, who revels in the part of an ageing gay lawyer who is too eager to dispense his own idea of punishment when he is suitably aroused.  Aurore Clément, Amira Casar, Clément Sibony and Jean-François Stévenin are just four of the seasoned pros that add lustre to Buch's sizzling script, which was written in collaboration with established screenwriter-director Christophe Honoré.

And then there's Nicolas Maury....  Somehow managing to look simultaneously like French cinema's answer to Harvey Fierstein and a queer Gallic spoof of Mr Bean, Maury seizes the film right from the start and just runs with it, like an Olympic athlete on industrial-strength steroids.  Maury has such an impact and exudes such charisma that you wonder how it is we have scarcely noticed him over the past decade, despite his appearances in a string of important films, including Nicolas Klotz's La Question humaine (2007) and Rebecca Zlotowski's Belle Épine (2010).  Being laugh-out-loud funny and likeable seems to come as naturally to this promising young actor as swigging a good glass of claret.  Could Nicholas Maury be the next seriously big thing in French cinema?  After being mesmerised by his entertaining and exquisitely truthful turn in Let My People Go! you'll be convinced he is just that...

Film Synopsis

Ruban enjoys an idyllic existence in Finland, content with his job as a village postman and happily settled with his boyfriend Teemu.  Then, one day, the dream suddenly becomes a nightmare.  As he confesses to Teemu that he may have killed a man whilst forcing him to take a parcel of banknotes he did not want, Ruban paints himself as both a thief and a murderer.  Ejected from his happy homestead, Ruban is forced to take the next flight back to Paris to stay with his Jewish family, who still haven't forgiven him for some of his life choices.  Ruban's own problems soon pale into insignificance as he becomes embroiled in a series of family crises...