Sami and Alexander – Weekend – Kommersant
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The New Toy is released, a remake of the mid-1970s hit, in which Pierre Richard was replaced by Jamel Debbouze, and the classic snotty ending is not the ending, but everything still works together.
Sami Cherif (Jamele Debbouze) is 45, a market teapot dealer, and lives in a canary-colored barracks where Africans have set up their noisy little Maghreb in the middle of Paris. The walls in the house are so thin that when Sami argues with his wife, neighbors from above, below and to the side are included in the discussion without leaving their apartments. In addition, Sami’s wife is the leader of the trade union at the factory where all these neighbors work and which is going to be closed soon. At Sami himself, the amount of overdue payments on the loan and debts to the usurer from the first floor exceeded € 3 thousand, and in all seriousness he asks his wife, who is in her eighth month of pregnancy, whether it is still too late to have an abortion. Out of desperation, Sami, a free bird, gets a job as a night watchman in a toy store.
Alexandre Etienne (Simon Fall, resembles Zac Efron as a child) is 11 years old and lives in a castle hung with originals by Klimt and Magritte, amid €2 million installations of a zebra butt sticking out of the wall and a sparkling toilet bowl, and the floor in his bedroom was painted Kishimoto himself, creator of Naruto. He drives around the castle in a car, scaring the servants, sleeps on a flying bed, fasts himself surrounded by holograms depicting the solar system, then the inhabitants of the deep sea, and resolutely refuses to go on vacation to Norway, because “the northern lights this year are so-so “. His father (Daniel Auteuil) is the owner of the same factory, the closure of which will soon turn the inhabitants of the canary house into an army of unemployed.
The paths of these two will cross when the father on the morning of Alexander’s birthday drops his usual: “I don’t have time, go to our toy store and choose what you want there”, and to spite the father, Alexander will point his finger at Sami, who is amusingly entangled in some networks, and will say: “I want this: wrap it up!” For €3,000, which will at least save him from debt, Sami allows himself to be packaged and become the heir’s new toy.
Doesn’t it remind you of anything? Well, of course, “New Toy” is a new “Toy”, a remake of the 1976 comedy, wiped to holes by the Soviet film distribution, and then by television. If you are over 40, you have already begun to notice that the world with all its political confrontations, moral climates, fashions and films seems to be starting to scroll all over again, and if you are closer to 50, you already know for sure that this is not a spiral, as historians taught , but a real carousel. It is logical that the new generation of children was taken out, polished, filled with holograms, a stroboscope, manga, cool electronic music (as if Didier Marouani had heard enough of Alexei Rybnikov and asked the Pet Shop Boys to help with the arrangement) and in this shining package they handed over the same Pierre Richard, our favorite plush camel with its ear torn off. More precisely, not with an ear, but with a hand – the successor of Richard Debbouze has a crippled right hand. In addition, Debbuze himself composed, and partly improvised for the film, topical witticisms that practically do not require translation in Russia: these are the miserable everyday life of a multicultural society and an economy built on lending, well known to local viewers.
The New Toy almost boasts of its social engagement. Here, for example, the phrase sounds: “Having sold himself as a toy, Sami Sheriff became the personification of the insignificance of a person in front of the capitalist system.” They didn’t say that in the old movie. But this is how Soviet film magazines formulated their approval in numerous articles-portraits of Pierre Richard. His popularity in the USSR at the turn of the 1970s-1980s was colossal, and “Toy”, in which social criticism sounded brightly, served for domestic film critics as the main reason for the actor’s popularity. The popularity of the film itself was somewhat artificially created from above: when the film rights license expired in 1985, Toy was bought again for television screenings and played in prime time on Sundays. And critics set her as an example to other, bad comedies with Richard, where “laughter was only for the sake of laughter.”
It was these bad comedies that we, the boys of the 1980s, loved with all our hearts. We loved Richard not for the way he re-educates the little billionaire, rubbing his own snot and tears in the finale in the expectation that they will flow with us too. We loved him for sticking his foot in the toilet and wandering with him on his foot instead of a shoe through the corridors of the bank entrusted to him. For shaving foam, which he confused with toothpaste, and when he had to answer questions from the special services, he blew bubbles from his mouth. For hair dye, which he mistook for shampoo in the bathroom of the movie star Jane Birkin, and ended up at the women’s high school to teach a mathematics lesson with pink curls. For the way in the dizzying comedies of Claude Zidi the philistine world turned into a farce, colliding with the world of show business – and then the predictable pre-election chatter of the provincial mayor’s office was drowned out by shootouts from the filming of an American western (“He Gets Angry”, 1974), and the well-established rituals of a banking the services turned into a den when the bank was boarded by the artists of the music hall (“Do not lose sight”, 1975). And of course, separately we loved Gerard Ury’s The Umbrella Prick (1980), where the filming of a gangster film was mixed up to death with real gang warfare and fake blood flowed plentifully and in equal proportions with real blood – this guignol (and even based on real, murder of a Bulgarian dissident with a poisoned umbrella initiated by the KGB), Soviet criticism could not find any justification.
We did not like the snotty Toy. We just went to her to envy the kid who drives around the house in his own car, issuing fines to servants, and got at his full disposal the best thing in the world: Pierre Richard – so that for a couple, dressed up in movie cowboy costumes, from morning to night blow bubbles, walk in the toilets on your feet and turn a parent’s social event into a mass swim in the pool.
We must pay tribute to the authors of the “New Toy” – those classic scenes from the original, where the clown gag reached graphic perfection, they repeated one to one. When a kid in a toy store stretches out his hand, points his index finger in the direction of a living idiot and, with the unblinking look of a small robot, says: “I want this.” When a clown in a traffic inspector’s cap beats up a kid and writes a fine to him himself, and he says: “I don’t want to play anymore.” When a clown in full uniform and boots climbs into a foaming bath, and the boy, beside himself with happiness, jumps after him. And when in the finale the father and son will drive, motionless, like two participants in the funeral procession, in the back seat of the car, leaving behind the klutz, and the father will not stand it, he will command “Stop!”, And the kid will jump out, run to his favorite toy, rush to her, will press her whole small body, and she will only spread her arms.
In the old movie, the music would come in and the title “The End” would play. In the new one, the story will continue: the wife will give birth, Monsieur Etienne will announce the decision not to close the plant … However, this will not come as a surprise. The old film began the process of humanization of French comedy, which previously worked on pure eccentricity. And the remake is just the finish, the eloquent result of this process launched in 1976. And yet, since everything was just beginning in 1976, the heroes of the first “Toy” still existed in the given caricature images, and in the new one there is a lot of psychology, and the boy knows very well why he suffers, that he behaves like a goat, and to the question : “What’s the birthday? Where are the family, friends? – with the words “I’m full” leaves the untouched table. But for some reason it doesn’t bother me. And in the new ending, among all these successful births, unclosed factories and other molasses, you catch yourself spreading over the armchair for a long time with a smile all over your mitten, into which for some reason very tasty tears roll. Either the proximity of Christmas affects, or the fact is that after all we are not moving on a carousel, not in a circle, but, as historians have argued, in a spiral – and at each new turn we really become a little better. For some inexplicable reason, I still want to believe it.
In theaters from December 22
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