Les visiteurs series

  • Les visiteurs: La révolution (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2022) All right, I give up – Les visiteurs: La révolution is my third dud in a row in the Les visiteurs series, and I have to recognize that the very basics of this trilogy simply don’t grab me. If I had to guess, it would be that the series’ celebration of French history is the sticking point. It’s even more pronounced this time around, as the time-displaced heroes of the series find themselves not in modern times but poking around the French Revolution, mixing time periods and having fun with elements that should be familiar with European audiences… and are utterly baffling to French-Canadian ones. (I can’t even rationalize that I should know about the period as part of my ancestral history, considering that both main trunks of my family tree left France almost a century before the French Revolution.)  Absent any reason to care about the on-screen shenanigans, I’m left with a laborious comedy that can’t even sustain simple gags for too long. It doesn’t help that watching a third (or fourth, if you include the American remake) instalment in a series means that if you’ve missed the onboarding, you’ve missed a lot. It’s easy to recognize that the film is playing jokes with its own mythology (with the characters meeting their own descendants), but it doesn’t help if you care so little about previous films that this one doesn’t spark either. The result, no matter why, is uninvolving, overlong and only fitfully amusing. Apparently, my disappointment is hardly unique – Les visiteurs: La révolution also got terrible reviews overseas. That doesn’t improve anything, but it does make me feel less alone.

  • Les visiteurs [The Visitors] (1993)

    Les visiteurs [The Visitors] (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.