IXE-13 (1972)

(On Cable TV, June 2020) Classic French-Canadian film IXE-13 is more a performance piece than a movie or even a comedy. Handled by then-incandescent comedy troupe Les Cyniques, it takes inspiration from an earnest French-Canadian pulp serial (anticipating the OSS-117 revival decades later) and transforms it into an absurd musical parody that revels into its threadbare production values. With Les Cyniques on-board, IXE-13 takes aim at just about every target in sight, from Chinese peril to communists to English-Canadian superiority to the strange relationship between Québec and France, and doesn’t skimp on the indépendantiste viewpoint (which now feels like an inferiority complex, but that’s how it goes.) Not all of the comedy has aged well—even intentionally going for a hideously racist depiction of its Chinese characters doesn’t excuse it. On the other hand, it’s a thrill to see now-respected actors goofing it up in a piece of juvenilia, including a rather fetching Louise Forrestier and Carole Laure playing pin-up girl. The cheerfully absurd IXE-13 is so deeply set within French-Canadian culture of the early 1970s that it just be incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t there speaking joual. For Francophile cinephiles, it’s not so much a “must see” as a “have you seen it?”