La chèvre [Knock on Wood aka The Goat] (1981)

(On TV, January 2021) French comedian Pierre Richard makes good use of his circa-1980s awkward persona in La chèvre, playing a gaffe-prone bad luck magnet asked to track down the daughter of a French politician gone missing in Mexico. We’re clearly not far from Le Grand Blond movies here (the characters are named the same and act the same yet otherwise aren’t supposed to be the same—call it an added comic flourish) but the added wrinkle at the time was pairing him with a relatively younger and definitely thinner Gérard Depardieu as a glum private detective reluctantly tagging along. Much of the comic nature of the film has to do with Richard getting into absurdly unlikely trouble and Depardieu groaning. Of course, the narrative has the comically stupid character figuring things before his more traditional partner, all the way to the unlikely goal of their partnership. La chèvre is a crowd-pleaser that succeeds at its comic goals—If you like Richard’s screen persona at the time, it’s built on his comic skills, and the addition of Depardieu provides a straight man to heighten the unlikely nature of the trouble he gets himself into (something that’s missing from many of Richard’s solo efforts). The pairing proved to be so effective that it was repeated twice more, albeit not quite so successfully. While La chèvre can’t escape a certain number of stereotypes by sending Frenchmen in Mexico, it’s not hard to watch, and it ends on a somewhat good note.