Christian Clavier

  • Les Anges gardiens [Guardian Angels] (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) If I have one persistent complaint about French-language cinema (European or Canadian), it’s that it seems to have a specific problem keeping a consistent tone. Maybe it’s a mark of amateurism compared to the decades of accumulated Hollywood screenwriting experience. Maybe the French language is inherently more volatile than English (note: I don’t seriously believe this). Maybe the audiences don’t care as much. But Les anges gardiens certainly brings credence to my theory—it starts as a Hong Kong gangster action comedy before becoming a supernatural good-versus-evil-angels farce, and that barely hints at the way the film abruptly swerves from one emotional register to another, even landing into something like a poor-little-girl-lost maudlin moment toward the end. This being said, it’s not completely frustrating to watch. Committed performances from Gerard Depardieu and Christian Clavier (anticipating their collaboration on two Asterix/Obelix films) as, respectively, a nightclub owner and a Catholic priest elevate the material, and there’s a surprising abundance of special effects (not all of them equally successful), large-scale stunts and decent action sequences. The film was a massive box-office success in France upon release, but reviews weren’t so kind. There’s certainly a feeling that the script could have used a lot of tightening up to feel like more than two collections of semi-related sequences glued together: the lack of tonal control bleeds into a lack of crisp plot progression, and digressions that feel as if they go nowhere, inflating the film’s running time for no reason. (For the record—I liked the first half a lot better than the second.)  Les anges gardiens is lively and not unwatchable, but you can feel the potential left unrealized.

  • Astérix & Obélix contre César (1999)

    Astérix & Obélix contre César (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2019) Adapting a comic book to the big screen is a tricky exercise, even more so when it’s working from an exuberant source such as the Astérix and Obélix series. As someone who grew up on the series, the idea of attempting to adapt the comic violence, over-the-top gags and fantastic visuals of the comic seems hopeless. Astérix & Obélix contre César, as the first live-action adaptation of the series, clearly underscores how difficult it is. On the positive side, the film does manage to present an authentic Astérix adventure, complete with the wild cast of characters in the protagonist’s village. The state of computer-generated imagery circa 1999 is just barely enough to give an idea of what’s possible, while looking unfortunately dated twenty years later. A still-young Gerard Depardieu is featured as Obélix, along with Christian Clavier as Asterix. Roberto Benigni, then at the height of his international fame, showboats annoyingly in a villain role. The film works, but barely: other than the weirdness in trying to fit a fluid comic style in live-action, the film also frequently loses itself in useless subplots, and becomes actively irritating when it repeatedly tries to pairs up (despite objections from other characters) the fifty-something Depardieu with a much-younger love interest. Writer-director Claude Zidi doesn’t embarrass himself (the bar being low enough), but the approach here is rougher than in other later classic comics adaptations along the lines of Lucky Luke, Le Marsupilami or Gaston Lagaffe. (None of them were all that successful, but more so than here.) Considering what was available in 1999, it’s an honest half-success.