La Folie des grandeurs, a very free adaptation of Victor Hugo's Ruy Blas, was released in 1971 and, as luck would have it, is a masterpiece. It wasn't until the coronavirus invaded our shores that an article was devoted to this monument to French comic cinema in Le Regard Libre. I'm ashamed, because there are so many things I could say to explain why films like this can no longer be made today. The talent of Louis de Funès, a soundtrack by Michel Polnareff and lightness for the times: these are just some of the ingredients in the recipe for this farce.
«I have a little plan for our escape: we return to Madrid, we conspire, the king repudiates the queen, the old woman marries the parrot, Caesar becomes king, I marry him, and here I am queen!» This line comes from the very end of the film, and sums it up quite well. La Folie des grandeurs, is a series of adventures revolving around Don Salluste (Louis de Funès), the King of Spain's sulphurous Minister of Finance. We're in the middle of the 17th centuryth It's the turn of the 20th century, and don Salluste, greedy for money and abusing his power over his valet, is chased out of court by Queen Marie-Anne de Neubourg (Karin Schubert, later recycled in pornographic films). Driven by a thirst for revenge, Don Salluste devises a ploy to bring down the queen, based on a fake adultery. Nothing goes according to plan, and one misunderstanding follows another. And director Gérard Oury delivers a comedy of gold, with dialogue (co-written by Danièle Thompson and Marcel Jullian) to die for.
«A Spanish queen doesn't play blind man's bluff with a gentleman.
- Wer sagt das?
- Etiquette, Madame.»
Louis de Funès screams and runs around, his eyes bewildered, then his eyebrows furrowed, as usual. The simple fact of see Louis de Funès - you don't even need him watch - is funny. On this point in particular, Franck Dubosc is one of his heirs. Louis de Funès in any context is funny! The fact that Louis de Funès exists is funny! That's all there is to it. So a film starring an experienced de Funès is bound to be a masterpiece. But I'd go even further: La Folie des grandeurs is a film like no other. The proof of my assertion is that everyone in their right mind says the same thing. Joking aside, there's plenty to be said for this classic, with its many cult scenes.
Cult scenes
«Flatter me!» This famous imperative is enough to bring back memories of an equally famous film. And of one moment in particular, the bath scene, where Don Salluste is washed in a wooden tub by his valet Blaze (Yves Montand). As always with de Funès, it's all about the comedy of gesture. He's at the top of his game in his umpteenth exaggeratedly authoritarian performance. Don Salluste tells him: «Y a pas assez de mousse!»; Blaze replies: «Y a pas assez de cheveux! The valet spills a basin of water over his master's head. He washes his ears with a rag, pushing it in one ear and out the other. This makes Don Salluste's brain squeak, while his valet gives him the frotti-frotta. Laugh-out-loud funny.
Another cult scene is when Don Salluste wakes up. The one where Blase serves him sentences ending in golden rhymes: «C'est l'ooor... Il est l'oooor... L'ooor de se réveveilleeer... Mon seignoooor... Il est huit oooor!» Perhaps the funniest moment is when, all of a sudden, the agitated succeeds the pleasant, and Don Salluste says, referring to the gold coins Blaze is stirring, «There's one missing!» to which the valet replies, «Vous êtes sor?» Just as spontaneously, his lord replies, «Quite sor!» A comic version of the golden rhymes that we was already, in a dramatic way, in a verse of Jacques Brel's song, Don't leave me, recorded in 1959. And there are so many others, scenes we want to see again and again, such as the parrot's on the queen's balcony, or the strip-tease of the old duenna doña Juana (Alice Sapritch).
Lost lightness
How can it be that such a farce is still regarded as a masterpiece by those who watch it - apart from certain critics who will remain pedantic until the cemetery - when, for several decades now, everything that comes out in terms of comedies in French film production is experienced at best as a pale imitation of what was done in the good old days, at worst as a turnip, passing of course through all the ranges of cheesy and franchouillard? Why do we no longer live up to the standards of what were, above all, no-nonsense films? Are we no longer capable of making them? Our generation is no less stupid than the last...
Read also | 1966-1971: A golden age nobody lived through
A hint of an explanation comes to mind: it wasn't just films like La Folie des grandeurs which were light-hearted; that was also the time. In this comedy, a one-eyed man is mocked for being one-eyed (this was before the «gilets jaunes»), going so far as to show a surreal shot where the left side of the screen is in black; clichés of Spain are capitalized on; the German language is ridiculed (is it Nazi than to do it?), with this ironic line from Yves Montand: «Raus schnell... what a lovely language!» Today, in the age of moral overreach and the tyranny of minorities, this kind of levity is immediately suspect. Just think of the critical reception of What have we done to God?.
Gérard Oury and his team understood that when you choose to make a laugh, you laugh at everyone: the poor and the rich, the court and the villagers, Spain and France, Germany and Italy. Proof of this is the fact that the film is a Franco-Hispanic-Italian-German co-production. Proof, too - as if proof were needed, I'm laughing as I write - that Louis de Funès himself comes from a ruined Castilian noble family. All this works not just because we don't «get our knickers in a twist», but because every actor in this cinema has the intelligence to know what humor is all about. Remember what the director said in reaction to the negative reviews of Télérama, who criticized him for making the commercial (oh horror!) and the popular (oh horror!):
«Commercial? That stupid adjective makes me jump! It means nothing except that audiences go to see these shows. What is an author's ambition, from Euripides to Anouilh or Pinter? Who dreams of performing his works in front of empty chairs? (...) Making films with messages is a fashion. My message is laughter. When men laugh, they're not evil.»
Jean-Marc Loubier, «Louis de Funès, le berger des roses», Paris, Ramsay, 1991
When de Funès meets Polnareff
But what makes La Folie des grandeurs is also a comedy like no other, in that it relies on good artistic sense, no doubt echoing the good popular sense of the audience for these works. La Folie des grandeurs, is the meeting of the acting talent of Louis de Funès and the musical genius of Michel Polnareff. What a daring move! Gérard Oury had a nose for it, for the soundtrack co-written by the king of French pop, who was then at the height of his fame (1971 was also the year of his legendary album Polnareff's, singles Holidays and We'll all go to heaven, the film's music It only happens to others...) creates a contrast with the film's temporality by pastiching the music of the spaghetti westerns that were released at the time. The result is something fabulous, even more magical than funny, and a soundtrack that stays in your head:
This contrast is repeated throughout the film, which also features other alternations. The story oscillates between comically epic moments and more moving yet comic sequences. Times of agitation are succeeded by areas of calm, creating a rich aesthetic of both ambivalence and constancy. In addition to the complementarity of de Funès and Montand, Polnareff's music plays a major role in this interplay of contrasts, and we're not ashamed to admit that, despite being a parody of Ennio Morricone, the Love theme signed by the author of My regrets and Our words of love is a Christmas song that will bring tears to your eyes. By the way, I'm listening to it on a loop as I write these last lines. And it's to this tune, present in the film in many subtle variations, that we'll end this nostalgic coronavoyage together:
Write to the author: jonas.follonier@leregardlibre.com
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