Low Cost (2011)
Directed by Maurice Barthélémy

Film Review

Anyone who has ever flown with any of the low cost airlines will doubtless have accumulated a stack of anecdotes which are more readily assembled than a piece of IKEA furniture into a sidesplitting feature-length comedy.  Such appears to be the case with Maurice Barthélemy, whose frenetic comedy Low Cost looks as much like a personal compendium of painfully lived experiences as it does a merciless propaganda film from Air France.  Had the film stuck to real-life incident it would have made an entertaining enough film, but Barthélemy obviously thought that would make it too banal so instead it jets off into the realms of fantasy and becomes a mix of disaster movie spoof (à la Airplane (1980), but nowhere near as good) and zany survival movie, with some truly gruesome black comedy thrown in for good measure.  It's a crazy concoction which is entertaining in parts, although it may have you reaching for the sick bag in others.

After Barthélemy's previous two low key directorial efforts - Casablanca Driver (2004) and Papa (2005) - Low Cost looks positively unhinged, a succession of comedy sketches (some appalling, some totally hilarious) haphazardly slung together apparently with little thought as to whether it will all hold together.  Actually, the film does just about make it off the ground, and it does just about manage to come down to earth in the end, but the journey in between is as uncomfortable as Hell and not one you would ever want to repeat - a more apt metaphor for a budget airline flight you can hardly imagine.  If nothing else, the film lives up to its name - it could hardly do otherwise with virtually all of the action confined to the interior of a Boeing 737.

Jean-Paul Rouve, Judith Godrèche and Gérard Darmon are the main casualties of Barthélemy's shoestring flight of fancy.  None of this illustrious trio has ever looked more ridiculous nor failed to add value so spectacularly as they do here.  They are the dead weight that the film should have jettisoned in its first ten minutes, allowing the more interesting, and far funnier, supporting artistes - an extremely weird mix of personalities - to take over the flying asylum.  Rouve apparently has a small person phobia, which is unfortunate as one of his fellow passengers is a dwarf who is sensitive about his height.  Godrèche is an airhostess who for some unfathomable reason falls for Rouve (an industrial spy named Dagobert) and is fool enough to remain on the plane when Darmon, a retired pilot (or so he says), offers to take it back home when the real pilot refuses to play ball.  Most of the film involves Rouve, Godrèche and Darmon fielding bad jokes and trying hard not to look like disgruntled passengers who wished they had booked onto a classier flight.  The real fun of the film lies elsewhere, in the other characters who look scarily like what you would expect to find on a low cost flight.  It is this oddly likeable assortment of hypochondriacs, neurotics, bigots and general all-round weirdos that anchor the film in reality and prevent it from climbing too far into the heights of infantile absurdity.

When the plane is up in the air, the humour come freely enough, but when it touches down for a protracted stopover in some unspecified desert backwater inhabited only by camels and gun-toting cannibals the gag machine suffers an acute attack of bad taste and the gags become less digestible than whatever pre-packed mush they serve on budget flights at extortionate prices.  Black comedy is an art the French have never quite mastered and it shows throughout this long and mostly humourless sequence, in which most of the jokes which are not overtly racist and misogynistic revolve around someone having to remove a body part from a corpse.  A brilliant pedicurist gag just about makes this bearable.

Several gruesome deaths later (all intended in a comic vein, naturellement), the flight resumes with Darmon thankfully relegated to his passenger's seat.  It's at this judicious moment that Barthélemy fires up the comedy engines, making up for the preceding lapse with a much funnier sequence involving a dwarf, his pet rat and a musophobic goth with hi-jacking tendencies.  It's the full budget airline experience all right, cheap and choppy with enough sick-making incidents en route to make you wish you had made alternative arrangements.  But isn't that the fun of flying low cost?

Film Synopsis

For the passengers on a low cost flight from Djerba to Paris Beauvais, their journey gets off to a bad start when their departure is delayed for eight hours because of a fault with the plane's air conditioning.  Rather than wait, they prefer to take their chances by allowing a complete stranger, Jean-Claude, to pilot the plane back to France.  Jean-Claude is proud of his long service with a proper airline (Air France), but somehow his navigational skills have gone to pot since he retired and the plane ends up landing in an unrecognisable stretch of desert.  Before they know it, the passengers are attacked by gun-wielding barbarians who threaten to kill them.  From here on, things can only get worse...