Les visiteurs [The Visitors] (1993)

(On TV, July 2021) By French cinema standards, Les visiteurs was an unquestionable hit — the highest-grossing French film of 1993, a multi-nominee for the César Awards, followed by two sequels, and one of the films that solidified Jean Reno’s status as one of the leading French stars of the 1990s (all the way to his steady roles in Hollywood movies by the end of the decade). Despite its 2001 American remake, it’s also an irreducibly French film — by virtue of being a time-travel comedy in which denizens of the twelfth century are sent forward to 1992, it gets to play with France’s medieval past and its then-contemporary present. The fish-out-of-temporal water comic premise quickly leads to accessible gags (hmmm, toothpaste…) and Reno’s charisma does the rest even with a terrible haircut. Still, I had a harder time than expected in getting interested and staying interested in the result. Part of it may be that Frenchness doesn’t always carry over very well on this side of the Atlantic— anything having to do with French nobility, for instance, carries absolutely no power in the former colonies. (A friendly reminder—the gulf between the French and French Canadians is significantly wider than the one between the English and English-Americans.) The time-travel justification is strictly fantasy-based—something about mishandling potions—which does land the film into whatever-land where anything and everything is possible without much justification. Clearly aiming at large French audiences, you can see how Les visiteurs works on its intended target… but it’s not guaranteed that you will be part of that target.