Mon curé chez les nudistes (1982)
Directed by Robert Thomas

Film Review

Robert Thomas had established himself as a popular playwright in France (his best known work being Huit femmes, later adapted for cinema by François Ozon as 8 femmes) before he started making films in the mid-1960s.  Thereon, it was pretty well downhill all the way, at least as far as the quality of his work was concerned.  With Mon curé chez les nudistes, his fourth film, Thomas hit rock bottom with a shameless attempt to capitalise on the success of bawdy sex comedies that had taken off in France in the wake of the Emmanuelle phenomenon of the mid-1970s.  The film's isn't just exploitative - no mainstream French comedy before this had dared to show so much acreage of female breast and buttock - it is also unbelievably tacky, and there's hardly a gag in the film that doesn't make you cringe as though you've just had a severe attack of heartburn.

If there is any sense at all to the plot, it's very carefully concealed (just about the only thing that is, given the amount of nudity on offer).  A priest (a totally unfunny Paul Préboist) who woos his congregation with animal impressions, is parachuted into a nudist camp on a mission to save as many souls as he can.  (If he fails, he can hardly be defrocked, since frocks and all other wearing apparel are outlawed in the camp.)  There then ensues a series of cretinous episodes, some involving a landowner with a pathological dislike of nudists, before the whole thing is hastily wrapped up with a marriage, a dodgy deal and another great victory for the Catholic church.  The abundance of female nudity presumably accounts for the implausibly large audience the film attracted (1.2 million in France) - there's precious little else the film offers in return for the price of a cinema ticket.  If Robert Thomas had stopped here we might have forgiven him, but no, he had to follow this up with a sequel, the equally risible Mon Curé Chez les Thaïlandaises.

Film Synopsis

Whilst his methods are far from orthodox, a village priest is having some success in gathering a congregation for Mass.  The collection has never been so bountiful since he introduced advertising as part of the service.  Impressed by the priest's savoir faire, his bishop invites him to apply his talents to a more pressing challenge - to bring a group of nudists back to the path of righteousness.