Tanguy, le retour (2019)
Directed by Étienne Chatiliez

Film Review

Thirty years ago, director Étienne Chatiliez made an impressive splash with his first feature - La Vie est un long fleuve tranquille (1988) - achieving a critical and box office success that immediately established him as an auteur with immense public appeal.  This he followed with Tatie Danielle (1989), in which he showed a flair for black comedy that he then turned to devastating effect in his satirical comedy Tanguy (2001).  A laugh-out-loud crowdpleaser that attracted an audience of 4.3 million, Tanguy portrayed a situation that many French households knew only too well - grown-up children being forced to go on living with their parents because their prospects of finding a home of their own were virtually non-existent.

Almost two decades on, the problem of accommodation for the young still persists in France, but it is not the burning issue it was in the late 1990s.  Time have moved on and the French are now far more preoccupied with other matters - mass immigration, terror attacks, radicalisation, tax on fuel, climate change and, most pressingly, finding a President they can stand for more than five days.  With this in mind, it would seem odd that Chatiliez should bother to revisit the subject of his 2001 film.  It would appear that he is merely the latest in a rapidly growing list of filmmakers to succumb to the temptation to knock out a spurious sequel to an earlier hit of his.

After Tanguy, Chatiliez's popularity has taken something of a nosedive and his subsequent comedies - Agathe Cléry (2008) and L'Oncle Charles (2012) - struggled to find an audience and were justly panned by the critics.  With Tanguy, le retour the director on whom critics and audience once smiled so warmly has reached his all-time nadir (unless he is planning a sequel to this one)

Eagerly complicit in this awful crime against sound artistic judgement, Éric Berger reprises the role of the titular Tanguy, looking scarcely a day older than when we last saw him 18 years ago.  The character is just as unappealing as he was in the first film and once again our sympathies are more readily directed towards his long-suffering parents, played by those much-loved stalwarts of French cinema, André Dussollier and Sabine Azéma.  The latter are no doubt used to challenging roles (having both worked with such punctilious auteurs as Alain Resnais on many occasions), but even they appear to buckle under the will-sapping ordeal of salvaging Chatiliez's grade-A comedy disaster.

We can forgive Tanguy, le retour for being behind the times (by at least ten years).  What we cannot pardon is the fact that it isn't remotely funny, despite the incredible extremes it goes to to extract laughs from its unfortunate audience, with the deranged relish of a Medieval torturer suffering from a bad attack of hemorrhoids.  In the years since he gave the loathsome Tanguy his first outing, Chatiliez would seem to have had something of a humour bypass, or at the very least lost sight of the subtle distinction between well-judged comedy and unadorned inanity.

After acquiring a warehouseful of stock clichés, Chatiliez splatters these over his script in a crude imitation of Jackson Pollock and mechanically directs his characters through a succession of unutterably daft situations like a blind shepherd guiding his flock across a well-stocked minefield, with similar inexpressibly messy results.  Dussollier and Azéma do their best with the awful material they are given but, with their characters now reduced to a silly two-dimensional semblance of their former selves, they soon become as cringe-making as everything else in this ghastly enterprise.

With both plot and gags pretty well exhausted by its mid-point, the film then goes off in an even more ludicrous direction, making one last desperate attempt at extorting humour from a random burst of ikky political incorrectness.  Once Chatiliez's flirtation with the Yellow Peril has failed to switch on his now all but atrophied humour circuits, the tormented spectator must go on watching in the certain knowedge that the film offers as much prospect of laughter as a full-on nuclear holocaust.  Mainstream French comedy has delivered quite a few turkeys of late, but few are as ill-nourished and indigestible as this.

Film Synopsis

Tanguy Guetz is 44 when he shows up unexpectedly on his parents' doorstep, desperately in need of moral support after his Chinese wife Meï Lin walked out on him, leaving him with a teenage daughter Zhu.  Naturally, Paul and Édith Guetz are delighted to see their son again, forgetting in this moment of happy reunion how much difficulty they had driving him from their home a decade and a half before.  The couple, now retired and always in need of something to distract them, take it upon themselves to reawaken their only son's zest for life.

It isn't long before Tanguy realises that his true place is beside his mother and father.  With the umbilical cord reinstated it looks as if nothing will cause Tanguy to leave home again.  And why should he, when he has two such devoted parents?  Within three short months, Paul and Édith agree that they must resort to desperate measures if they are to preserve their sanity.  Tanguy and his troublesome offspring must go - and there are no lengths to which his parents will go to achieve this ambition...