Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu? (2014)
Directed by Philippe de Chauveron

Film Review

Having attracted an audience of over 12 million, it's the film that is likely to be the biggest home produced hit at the French box office in 2014, but will it have any impact outside France?  Probably not.  Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu? touches on two of the most pressing issues in France today - racial prejudice and national identity - but it is a quintessential mainstream French comedy and its marketability abroad is, to say the least, limited.  Judging by other French mainstream chart toppers in recent years - Les Profs in 2013 and Sur la piste du Marsupilami in 2012 - what gets 'bums on seats' in French cinemas is not quality or considered introspection but a cobbled together frenzy of facile comedy situations and a distribution campaign executed with ruthless efficiency.  2014's French box office wonder is more of the same, low brow entertainment for a mass audience that would rather have a bellyful of easy laughs than a dose of cultural enlightenment.

The most tragic thing about Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu? (it's English language title - Serial (Bad) Weddings - is just as ugly and forgettable) is that it starts with an excellent, highly topical premise but fails to make anything of it.  There is an obvious resonance with 2011's mainstream hit Intouchables (2011), but whereas that film came at the issue of racial intolerance from an unusual angle and had something sensible to say on the subject, 2014's racially-themed comedy is nothing more than a haphazard morass of predictable (mostly dated) gags, borrowed plot ideas, poorly developed characters and a pro-multiculturalism 'message' that is broadcast so often and so loudly that it risks driving the spectator into the welcoming arms of Marine Le Pen.

By now, the film's director Philippe de Chauveron has grown accustomed to mainstream success.  Having scripted the inexplicably popular Neuilly sa mère! (2009) he struck box office gold with his ungainly comicbook adaptation L'Elève Ducobu (2011), and its sequel.  Chauveron's fifth film is more obviously geared towards an adult audience than the two that preceded it but it offers the same wearying barrage of drawn out, unfunny gags and actors so hyperactive that you'd swear they were either wired up to the mains or else od'ed on Prozac before each take.  There was a time when Christian Clavier was one of the funniest men in French cinema.  Here, looking like a horrible approximation to a poor man's Louis de Funès (grouchy but not remotely funny), he is as easy to endure as a severe attack of dyspepsia.  Fortunately, it is possible to discern some talent in the cast of young and relatively unknown performers, but this is largely wasted on a middling-to-poor screenplay that should have gone through at least a dozen re-writes before it went anywhere near a film camera.  If only a little more care and discretion had gone into the writing, this could have been a half-decent, readily exportable comedy.

Even allowing for the film's brilliant distribution strategy and the apparent lack of discernment in today's French cinema audience, it is hard to account for the phenomenal popularity of what is essentially a chronically over-hyped, badly written comedy.   Its attempts to get to grips with one of the most pressing concerns facing modern France are at best half-hearted and all we get is a dreary downpour of unsophisticated gags and stale platitudes.  Recent electoral gains by the Front National and escalating racial tensions across France, both fuelled by concerns over immigration, have heightened awareness about race and racial identity.  With one in five marriages (or equivalent) in France now involving couples of mixed faith or racial origin (way, way above the European average), it would seem that multiculturalism is becoming a hard and fast reality of French life, and may be this is why Chauveron's simplistic film has found such a large audience.  The film's depiction of a sea change in racial acceptance from one generation to the next breathes hope for the future, although its conclusion, that even the bigots will see the light and bury the hatchet in the end, is perhaps a tad optimistic.  Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu? is about as superficial and clumsy as a French mainstream comedy can be, but it offers a tantalising vision of a world where racial intolerance is rapidly heading for extinction.  That might well be the secret of its success.  Or maybe the French just like to laugh at bad jokes.

Film Synopsis

Claude Verneuil and his wife Marie are Gaullist bourgeois Catholics, and proud of it.  Even though they are staunch traditionalists, they like to think they can move with the times.  Their willingness to do just this has been sorely tested when their three eldest daughters chose to marry, respectively, a Muslim, a Jew and a Chinese man. Their most fervent wish, to see one of their offspring married in church, could well come true when their youngest daughter announces that she intends to marry a Catholic named Charles.  Unfortunately, the next prospective son-in-law is not quite what Claude and Marie had hoped for...