Film by Frenchman Dani Boon “Paris: All Inclusive”. Review

The film “Paris: All Inclusive” (La Vie pour de vrai) by Frenchman Dani Boon is in theaters. A good comedy about unlucky and senseless people pleased with its kind senselessness Mikhail Trofimenkov.

The hero of Voltaire’s story “Candide, or Optimism” (1759) is one of the main household characters of European culture. Naive, simple-minded, optimistic Candide grew up and experienced one after another disappointment in the wisdom of the world order, faced with the cruel tragedies of his century: from the Seven Years’ War to the Lisbon earthquake. Over the years and centuries, Voltaire’s Candide became smaller, faded, and crumbled into hundreds of faces, eventually becoming a hero of mass culture. Once again he returned to the screen in the film by Dani Boon under the name Tridan (Dani Boon).

Well, yes, of course, Boone’s flight of thought and level of hero are not at all the same as Voltaire’s. But still, something of the educational and humanistic message of the original source has been preserved to this day.

The modern Candide is under fifty dollars. He was born, raised and almost grew old in the Mexican resort of Los Feliz, where his hippie parents ran a hotel. Tridan, whose social skills amount to those of a hotel entertainer, firmly believes that people are kind and disposed towards him by definition. Having never left the hotel premises, one has no idea that in restaurants in the outside world it is customary to pay for food. He strums homemade songs on the guitar about love and separation in the spirit of the most mossy Soviet PCB. And he cherishes undying love for eight-year-old Violetta, who once stayed at the hotel, with whom he played on the rocks forty years ago. The games ended with Father Tridan’s fatal fall from a cliff, but he, one could say, pushed this tragedy into the fields of his consciousness, if he had consciousness.

In short, having saved as much as €10 thousand by the age of fifty, apparently saving on ice cream, he rushes to Paris to find Violetta and live happily ever after with her. Fortunately, the caring mother, desperate to rein in her child, hands him the keys to a Parisian apartment that once belonged to her first husband. It’s easy to guess that the first Parisian taxi driver will sneak away from Tridan with all his simple luggage. Boots bought in a store will be three sizes smaller than Tridan’s paws. And in the apartment you will find the bald, unlucky and angry brother Louis (Kad Merad), who is not at all happy to see his relative, especially since he has rights to part of the living space.

The housing problem spoiled not only the Soviet people, but also the Parisians. For the sake of his square meters, Louis, showering Tridan with Judas kisses, will start a simple, as it seems to him, intrigue. He will not only tolerate the company of a wounded pigeon that his brother drags into the house. He will even give his mistress Roxane away – here Boone also sends his greetings to Edmond Rostand: Roxane was the name of the love of the ridiculous Cyrano de Bergerac – to the notorious Violetta, so that she can persuade Tridan to go back to Mexico and give up his living space.

And this is where the sweet and senseless, albeit cheerfully written, Parisian vaudeville takes on a new dimension. Because Charlotte Gainsbourg literally bursts onto the scene in the middle of the film as the fake lover. Apparently yearning for comedic roles, Gainsbourg does not deny himself anything. If she portrays a nymphomaniac, then in such a way that men almost faint from horror. If he imitates jealousy, he transforms into a thundercloud. Everything is excessive and irresistible.

Boone, however, is also going wild. At least an idiotic car race in the best sense of the word through the streets of Paris, ending for its participants with an equally absurd and blissful lying under morphine in a hospital ward, is worth a lot. So, if in modern French cinema there are reflections of the great comic school of the 1970s, it is in Paris.