Radin! (2016)
Directed by Fred Cavayé

Film Review

Fred Cavayé's filmmaking career got off to a commendable start with three slick, well-paced action thrillers: Pour elle (2008), À bout pourtant (2010) and Mea culpa (2014).  For his fourth feature, he changes tack and applies his directing talents to an altogether different genre - comedy.  This isn't Cavayé's first brush with comedy, as he previously contributed a humorous sketch to the anthology film Les Infidèles (2012), and it is unlikely to be his last, given that the film has attracted an audience of three million in France.  Radin! stars Dany Boon and is the kind of bargain basement comedy that Boon would himself have directed had he been inclined to do so.  After his box office smash Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (2008), Boon has so far helmed three similar undemanding crowdpleasers and the most surprising thing about Radin! is that rather than direct the film himself he places himself in the hands of a director with next to no experience in the comedy genre.

Like Boon's own directorial efforts, Radin! starts out with a single good idea which it then proceeds to flog to death, with increasing desperation as the film progresses.  It's essentially an updated version of Molière's L'Avare, albeit with a far less ample quantity of human interest and humour.  Cavayé and his star do what they can with the film's mediocre material (the script looks as if it should have gone through at least another half a dozen re-writes) but they struggle to make the film even remotely entertaining, there being only a finite number of times you can replay the same gag about a man with a pathological aversion to spending his own money.  Even an actor as habitually likeable as Dany Boon fails to make his grotesque skinflint character sympathetic - and this is one of the killer weaknesses of the film.

Despite being portrayed by some very capable actors (Noémie Schmidt and Laurence Arné both deserve far better), none of the characters rings true and this, together with a fairly incoherent and pretty incredible plot, makes the paucity of humour even harder to bear.  By the film's mid-point the gags (actually, it's the same single gag re-used over and over) have definitely passed their use-by date and thereafter your are more likely to cringe than laugh at Boon's hopeless attempts to juggle the conflicting needs of fatherhood, an unlikely romance and his habitual meanness.  The parsimonious lack of imagination that hampers the whole film is most apparent in an ending that is unbelievably crass.  Radin! has very little to commend it, and yet it was a box office hit, so I am clearly missing something.

Film Synopsis

François Gautier, a music teacher in his forties, may be a talented violinist but he is also the stingiest man on earth.  Nothing brings him out in a cold sweat faster than the arrival of the bill at the end of a restaurant meal, and scarcely a thing gets into his shopping trolley without it having first exceeded its sell-by date.  He has enough money to live a comfortable middleclass life but he'd rather save his hard-earned cash and live in a dark, unheated house than fork out for such luxuries as electricity and light bulbs.  How fortunate he is to have a bank manager willing to offer his services as a therapist, at no extra charge!  But François's happy miserly existence is threatened when he falls for his orchestra's new cellist, Valérie.  Dating is a new concept for the middle-aged skinflint and he is not psychologically equipped for its pecuniary impact.  François is barely coming to grips with this new crisis in his life when the daughter he never knew he had (the result of a condom that was well past its use-by date) suddenly turns up on his doorstep.  It is a miser's worst nightmare come true...