Brice de Nice (2005)

(In French, On TV, July 2019) I had to watch Brice de Nice because some of its comic stylings had made it overseas all the way to the former French colonies—namely, the title character’s tic of loudly proclaiming, “Cassé!” (“Broken!”) after successfully insulting someone (or making them speechless). Then there’s Jean Dujardin as well, one of the better-known French actors of the twenty-first century so far. Alas, there isn’t much more to Brice de Nice than “Cassé!”: As the film laboriously sets up its half-dozen recurring gags, there’s a growing dread that it will just keep going in that vein for its duration, and unfortunately it doesn’t: It gets worse. The jokes are slight, the protagonist is obnoxious and even the flights of fancy away from the real world don’t work. The film actually gets exasperating thirty minutes in, as the protagonist is stripped of most assets and loses much of the rich-boy humour that unlimited means can provide. The rich-boy-becomes-poor comedy just keeps adding to the character’s humiliation, and to our exasperation. Part of it may be a very French sense of humour, but I suspect that even on the other side of the Atlantic, Brice de Nice is just a lame film.