Inhuman comedy – Newspaper Kommersant No. 237 (7438) of 12/21/2022

James Ut’s Le Nouveau Jouet, a remake of Francis Weber’s classic comedy The Toy (1976), is released. There, Pierre Richard played one of his best roles – Francois Perrin, who became the living toy of a satiated multimillionaire offspring and managed to re-educate his exploiters. Mikhail Trofimenkov fell into such despair over Utah’s opus that he revised Weber’s original for therapeutic purposes.

Probably, you just have to put up with Yuta’s film – well, take it for a sociological phenomenon, and not for a comedy. Yes, and Gallic humor is not the same and will never be the same as in the days of the great Weber, and French realities have changed irrevocably in a quarter of a century. But in any case, I really want to compare the two films, write out such two columns: what was, what became.

So, there was François Perrin, a shaggy and unlucky journalist, at whom little Eric pointed his finger: “I want it.” For all the burlesque, it would seem, self-sufficient plasticity of Richard, in his character there was a genuine bitterness of the humiliation of an intellectual before the hostile, but invincible power of money. And the revolt he and Eric had started—publishing a fanzine against rich dad—was the desperate revolt of a man destined to either die or sell out.

In Utah’s version, the Moroccan Sami becomes the toy. His stand-up comedian Jamel Debbouze played him no better and no worse than any stand-up comedian of North African origin can play a mindless kid from a sleeping suburb of Paris, pouring street-folk wisdom like: “Don’t be sad, otherwise the tail will not grow.” The costs of political correctness have nothing to do with it. So, in the American remake of Richard Donner (1982), an African American became a toy. But the local hero of Richard Pryer was, like the hero of Richard, an intellectual, a writer forced to work as a janitor. That is, there was a motive of double humiliation.

To sympathize with Sami about the fact that he is being bought as a living toy, the audience has absolutely no reason. Amusing a boy – how is it worse and more humiliating than trading in a flea market with meaningless teapots with two spouts? To rub the graters with the boys from the district, each of whom either Sami owes something, or do they owe him? To lie to a pregnant wife, who, unlike her husband, works in real production, about the stunning prospects for her small business? Like selling the entire batch of their goods to Lithuania or the prospects for the production of teapots with three spouts.

Debbuz is not just Moroccan by origin, but also disabled. All of France knows that when the juvenile delinquent from Nantes was fourteen years old, he was run over by a train and has been hiding his crippled right hand in his jacket pocket ever since. Honor and praise to the actor. Managed, despite a severe injury, to make a great career. But couldn’t Sami’s injury have been somehow scripturally motivated? And then, your will, a real kid looks strange, always dressed up in a jacket.

In Weber’s film, Perrin’s antagonist was the tycoon Rambal-Cochet, played by the great Michel Bouquet, who looks both like a Jesuit and like any of the prime ministers or presidents (with the exception of de Gaulle, of course) of the Fourth Republic: a magnificent icon of power.

In the film Utah, his understudy named Philippe Etienne was played by Daniel Auteuil, perhaps the best French actor of recent decades. His hero no longer looks like Francois Mitterrand, but like an aged gangster. Yes, over the years he looks more and more like Robert De Niro. But something in Auteuil comes through mythologically French, something from Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura.

Probably, only the presence of Auteuy gives at least some, if not meaning, then interest to the New Toy. That he looks at his son, who lives in an escheated virtual world, that he looks at the meaningless Sami with a bitter smile of a man who remembers other times when French comedy was still French comedy, and not a booth for the topic of the day.