Pas de problème! (1975)
Directed by Georges Lautner

Film Review

After the ordeal of making Les Seins de glace (1974), director Georges Lautner was badly in need of some light relief, and this might explain why his next film, Pas de problème!, is one of his liveliest and most erratic comedies.  Looking like an improvised road movie treatment of Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry (1955), this is far from being Lautner's greatest film but it is among his most entertaining, its main attraction being the odd but brilliant assortment of comedy performers that it throws into its ramshackle plot, like rabbits into a threshing machine.  Lautner co-scripted the film with Jean-Marie Poiré (the son of his producer Alain Poiré), who would later become phenomenally successful as a director with his zany comedies Papy fait de la résistance (1983) and Les Visiteurs (1993).  Poiré's idea of humour is far more demotic and uninhibited than Lautner's and often gives way to silliness that is not apparent in the director's earlier films.  Whilst Lautner has fun directing some ludicrously over-the-top action scenes, such as the mad car chase that starts off the film and has the word self-indulgence stamped all over it, his screenwriter amuses himself with the kind of lowbrow comedy chicanery that would become his watchword.

Café-théâtre diva Miou-Miou is stunning in her leading film role, having recently distinguished herself in a supporting role in Jean Chapot's Les Granges brûlées (1973).  Apart from her visual impact, she has little to do in the film other than look suitably girly and feeble, leaving it to her male co-stars Bernard Menez and Henri Guybet (who later appear even more girly and feeble) to dig her out of the hole that the fates (or rather some unnamed hoodlums) have thrown her into.  Menez's casting as the stammering, inept loser is hardly surprising (it's about the only role he was ever cast in) but he makes an effective bedfellow to the smug Guybet, and who else could convincingly play the son of Jean Lefebvre?  One of the most familiar faces to devotees of French film comedy, Lefebvre is on top form, for once playing a stern paternal figure instead of the usual sympathetic loser he is best known for.

Lautner's glamorous mum Renée Saint-Cyr shows up in a short but memorable sequence late in the film, and Miou-Miou's partner at the time, Patrick Dewaere, puts in a cameo appearance.  Another café-théâtre star, Gérard Jugnot, is also roped in briefly, mercilessly ripping the carpet from under Menez's feet as he does so.  Anny Duperey, female sensuality personified, has no end of fun playing Lefebvre's neglected mistress, although it is Lefebvre himself who gets the weirdest comedy digression when he picks up a gorgeous hitchhiker named Emmanuelle, with fairly predictable results.  Whereas many of Lautner's later comedies struggle to keep going much beyond the mid-point, Pas de problème! never shows any sign of running out of steam, and even if the plot doesn't seem to have any idea where it's heading the jokes just keep coming - non-stop amusement all the way.  Enjoy the neat little homage to L'Auberge rouge (1951).

Film Synopsis

Riddled with bullet wounds, the victim of a vendetta manages to drag himself to the door of Anita Boucher where he begs for shelter.  The man then collapses, killed by his injuries.  Anita has already had her fill of the judicial system - she has just been released from prison - and so has no intention of notifying the police of what has just taken place.  Instead, she persuades Jean-Pierre Michalon, a man who chats her up in a nightclub, to help her get rid of the body.  Thanks to Jean-Pierre's quick thinking, the dead man is soon in the boot of the car belonging to his father, a businessman.  It is a temporary solution but the plan goes horribly awry when Jean-Pierre's father drives off in his car sooner than expected, for an assignation with his mistress, Janice.  On the way, he picks up a an attractive hitch-hiker...