«La folie des grandeurs», a comedy like no other

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 century^th 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 shouts and runs around, first with a bewildered look in his eyes and then with a furrowed brow, as usual. The mere 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 is funny no matter what! The very fact that Louis de Funès exists is funny! That’s the whole point. So, naturally, a movie starring a seasoned de Funès is bound to be a masterpiece. But I’ll go even further: La Folie des grandeurs It’s the kind of movie they don’t make anymore. The proof of what I’m saying is that all sensible people agree. Joking aside, there’s a whole lot to say about this classic, which features many scenes that have become cult favorites.

Cult scenes

«Flatter me!» One need only recall this famous command to bring to mind, for an entire nation, the memory of an equally famous film. And 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 physical comedy. He’s at the top of his game in his portrayal of yet another overly authoritarian character. Don Salluste tells him, «There’s not enough lather!»; Blaze replies, «There’s not enough hair!» The valet tips a basin of water over his master’s head. He washes his ears with a rag, pushing it into one ear and pulling it out the other. It makes a squeaking sound inside Don Salluste’s brain while his servant gives him a good scrub. It’s enough to make you cry with laughter.

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 we explain that such a farce is still, even today, regarded as a masterpiece by those who watch it—aside from certain critics who will remain pedantic until the day they die—when, for several decades now, everything released in the realm of comedy in French cinema has been viewed, at best, as a pale imitation of what was done in the good old days, and at worst as a total flop—spanning, of course, the entire spectrum of tacky and crassly French? What is it that prevents us from living up to what were, above all, films that didn’t take themselves too seriously? Are we no longer capable of making them? Yet our generation isn’t any less intelligent than the previous one…

Read also | 1966–1971: A Golden Age That No One Experienced

A tentative explanation comes to mind: it wasn't just movies like La Folie des grandeurs which were lighthearted; that was just the spirit of the times. In this comedy, a one-eyed man is mocked simply because he is one-eyed (this was before the «Yellow Vests» movement), going so far as to show a surreal shot where the left side of the screen is black; it capitalizes on Spanish stereotypes; it ridicules the German language (is it Nazi (Why not just do it?), with this ironic line spoken by Yves Montand: «Raus schnell»…what a beautiful language!” Today, in an age when morality has overstepped its bounds and minorities wield tyranny, this kind of lightheartedness immediately arouses suspicion. Just consider the critical reception of What have we done to God?.

Gérard Oury and his team understood that when you choose to follow the path of comedy, you end up making fun of everyone: the poor and the rich alike, the court and the villagers, Spain and France, Germany and Italy. Proof of this is that the film is a French-Spanish-Italian-German co-production. Further proof of this—as if proof were needed, and I’m laughing as I write this—is that Louis de Funès himself came from a ruined family of the Castilian nobility. All of this works not only because they don’t «take themselves too seriously,» but because every actor in this film has the intelligence to understand what humor is all about. Let’s recall what the director said in response to the negative review of Télérama, who criticized him for making commercial (oh, the horror!) and popular (oh, the horror!) music:

«Commercial? That stupid adjective makes my blood boil! It means nothing except that audiences will go see these plays. What is the ambition of a playwright, from Euripides to Anouilh or Pinter? Who dreams of performing their works in front of empty seats? (…) Making films with a message is a fad. As for me, I have only one message: laughter. When people laugh, they aren’t mean.»

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 It is also the kind of comedy they don't make anymore; it relies on artistic sensibility, which no doubt resonates with the common sense of the audience for these works. La Folie des grandeurs, it’s the meeting of Louis de Funès’s acting talent and Michel Polnareff’s musical genius. That took some guts! Gérard Oury had a good nose for talent, because the soundtrack—co-written by the king of French pop, who was then at the height of his career (1971 was also the year of his legendary album Polnareff’s, singles Holidays and We'll all go to heaven, the film's music That only happens to other people...) creates a contrast with the film's temporality by pastiching the music of the spaghetti westerns that were coming out at the time. The result is something fabulous—more magical than funny—and a soundtrack that sticks in your head:

This contrast will recur throughout the film, which will also feature other shifts in tone. The story oscillates between comically epic moments and more moving sequences that remain humorous nonetheless. Periods of turmoil are followed by moments of calm, creating a rich aesthetic marked by both ambivalence and consistency. In addition to the chemistry between de Funès and Montand, Polnareff’s music plays a major role in this interplay of contrasts, and we can admit without hesitation that, even though it’s a parody of Ennio Morricone, the Theme of Love signed by the author of My regrets and Our Words of Love is so beautifully Christmassy it brings tears to your eyes. In fact, I’ve been listening to it on repeat while writing these last few lines. And it’s with this melody—which appears in the film in many subtle variations—that we’ll wrap up this nostalgic coronavirus journey together:

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