Benoît Brière

  • Le sens de l’humour [A Sense of Humour] (2011)

    Le sens de l’humour [A Sense of Humour] (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) One of the defining characteristics of French-Canadian society is its fondness for comedians — stand-up comedians, stage comedians, TV comedians or movie comedians, with a considerable amount of crossover between the four. The prototypical French-Canadian blockbuster often features one or two familiar comedians, plus a premise riffing off suspense tropes with a comic attitude. Le sens de l’humour is clearly in that vein, as it stars comic superstars Louis José Houde, Michel Côté and Benoit Brière in a film where a strong thriller premise is played for laughs. Here, two touring stage comedians (House and Côté) make fun of someone they shouldn’t during a show… and find themselves kidnapped by a serial killer eager for comedy lessons. Quite a bit of the film’s middle act delves into a meta-deconstruction of humour itself, as the stand-ups try to teach likability and humour principles to someone strikingly inept at it. There’s more, of course — the third act is all about absolving the “serial killer,” introducing a bigger threat and somehow defusing it while not having the rest of the film teetering into a more serious vein. Parts of it certainly work — the three leads have rapport, and the smaller-scale set-pieces can be funny. What doesn’t work quite as well is the conclusion, which has trouble resolving all of the impossible subplots it has created for itself. But those issues scarcely mattered at the film’s release: Le sens de l’humour was the second highest-grossing French-Canadian film of 2011, coming very closely behind Starbucks (which was remade in Hollywood as Delivery Man) — another lighthearted film featuring a well-known comedian.

  • Louis 19, le roi des ondes [Louis 19, King of the Airwaves] (1994)

    Louis 19, le roi des ondes [Louis 19, King of the Airwaves] (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2020) The worst thing that can happen to a satirical comedy is to be surpassed by reality, and while Louis 19 is clearly not the same class of film as Network, they do share the distinction of being markedly less funny or outlandish as when they first aired. Back in 1994, the idea that a perfect everyman would be followed 24/7 by a TV crew as they lived their lives was high-concept stuff—twenty-five years later, it smacks of the worst of reality TV or social media influencers. (If the premise sounds doubly familiar to you, it’s because Louis 19 remains one of the rare French-Canadian movies remade by Hollywood as 1999’s Edtv.) At times, you just want to hug the film’s screenwriter and say, “Oh boy, you haven’t seen anything yet.” It doesn’t help that the film is executed as a straightforward low-brow comedy, straight from formula filmmaking as it wrings out the usual complications out of its premise. Martin Drainville is a suitably good nebbish protagonist, while the rest of the film’s cast is (as if often the case with French-Canadian films) a who’s who of Montréal actors at the time: Macha Grenon has another walk-in role as a sex symbol; Benoît Brière has a remarkable supporting role as a cameraman; Dominique Michelle holds a plum comic role, and so on all the way to the cameos (Literary demigod Michel Tremblay as a TV show presenter!) Fortunately, even with the schematic three-act structure and unsurprising plot turns and post-reality TV staleness, Louis 19 is easy enough to watch, with a few smiles along the way. It still works, and we can still understand how it was the biggest-grossing Canadian film of 1994 in both official languages.