Nos femmes (2015)
Directed by Richard Berry

Film Review

Such was the phenomenal success of Eric Assous's 2013 comic stage play Nos femmes (performed to packed houses at the Théâtre de Paris) that a film adaptation was a dead cert.  France has a long tradition of adapting popular plays for the cinema, recent examples including Francis Veber's Le Dîner de cons (1998) and Mathieu Delaporte et Alexandre de la Patellière's Le Prénom (2012).  Richard Berry and Daniel Auteuil, the stars of the original stage play, readily agreed to reprise their roles in the film, with Thierry L'Hermitte drafted in to replace Didier Flamand.  Berry's daughter Joséphine also shows up in the film as Auteuil's daughter.  Berry himself assumed the directing duties, making this his fifth feature and a complete contrast from his last film, the feisty 2010 action-thriller L'Immortel (a.k.a. 22 Bullets).  With such proven material and a bankable trio of lead performers, the film could hardly fail.  Unfortunately, this is precisely what it does do - in pretty depressing fashion.

Nos femmes suffers from looking too much like a filmed piece of theatre.  Berry's attempts to prevent this by adding extra scenes and characters, along with a voiceover commentary and flashbacks, all look like last minute contrivances that merely serve to underscore the film's theatricality, although the main offenders are the actors themselves.  Auteuil and Berry are clearly having the time of their lives, but their expansive performances, which loudly emphasise every last gag and leave not the slightest space for subtlety, are ones that should have been left behind on the stage and not paraded in front of a film camera.  The lead actors' over-excessive style of acting quickly becomes tiring, and then nauseating, so that even the play's best gags fail to extract more than a grudging smirk.  Some of the humour hits the mark (the highlight being Berry's hilarious interpretation of a rap number) but for the most part the comedy simply fails to involve the spectator and just reeks of self-absorbed amateurishness.

Another reason why the film fared less well than it might have done is because it piles into a situation that has been mined to death in recent years, namely one in which a group of mature men get together and reflect on love, life and friendship - a format made popular by Marc Esposito's Le Coeur des hommes (2003) over a decade ago.  Since Esposito's film, there have been dozens of similar films, all regurgitating the same formula, and you can understand why French cinema audiences are starting to suffer from what might be termed 'grey buddy fatigue'.  Nos femmes is a shallow entry in this well-worn and by now pretty stale genre, and in common with 2015's other films of this ilk - Olivier Baroux's Entre amis (2015) and Philippe Guillard's On voulait tout casser (2015) - it is easy to see why it it had a hard time finding an audience.

Film Synopsis

Max, Paul and Simon have been the closest of friends for over thirty years.  Every summer, they go off on holiday together, leaving their wives behind to ensure that nothing will come between them and a good time.  Each of the three men has led a successful career, although their private lives leave much to be desired.  They meet up each week at Max's place to play cards, but one fateful evening Simon turns up, later than usual and obviously distressed, to reveal that he has just strangled his wife after a blazing row.  Simon has no intention of handing him over to the police and insists that his friends furnish him with a watertight alibi for the time of the murder.  Paul reluctantly agrees to help his friend out, but has a sudden change of heart when it emerges that Simon has been carrying on an affair with his daughter, Pascaline...