Pierre Richard

(On TV, January 2021) A few minutes into Les compères, the premise seemed familiar. A quick search confirmed my doubts: this was the original French film on which the mid-1990s Billy Crystal/Robin William vehicle Fathers’ Day was based. The starting point is distinctive enough to be noticeable: After her son goes missing, a woman separately contacts two ex-lovers with a plausible chronological claim to their paternity, and asks them to investigate. But the narrative fun begins when the two meet and realize the trick played on them. It all becomes a vehicle for comic actors, and the French version arguably does better than the American remake in using its headliners: Here we have Pierre Richard in his usual gaffe-prone neurotic persona, paired for the second time with Gérard Depardieu (younger and thinner than we’ve grown used to), who here plays a macho journalist. The rest of the film is almost immaterial—of course they’ll find it, and, of course, the point of it all is Richard and Depardieu sparring. The nature of Les compères as a vehicle means that there’s some repetitiousness to the proceedings, but that only counts as a problem if you’re not entirely happy with the two leads. Otherwise, you get what’s on the tin: Richard goofing up, Depardieu rolling his eyes and just enough plot to give us a feature-length comedy based on that interaction.

(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.