aka LES CLEFS DE BAGNOLE
Movie Review by EDF
Starring: Laurent Baffie, Daniel Russo, Claude Berri, Charles Gassot, Alain Terzian
Director: Laurent Baffie
When a movie comes along with the tagline of “don’t go see this shit”, your curiosity hits overdrive. This French comedy immediately makes no apologies for not being the best movie ever but it tries oh so hard to be clever and just ends up being annoying. It buckles under its own weight of ideas where writer, director and star throws in everything including the kitchen sink just in case he never makes another movie again. So, what is it about?
Laurent Baffie goes to a variety of producers and actors in order to gain support for his movie script, The Car Keys. He is met with a resounding “No” from everyone. He bugs the hell out of everybody and even approaches them on the street and visits their homes. The general opinion is that the script sucks and even the likes of Eric Cantona will not even touch the project. Producers reluctantly take the script off Baffie only to immediately drop it into the bin right in front of Baffie.
Baffie manages to finance the movie and we get a chance to see Baffie’s celluloid effort. We follow Baffie and his friend Daniel Russo, who also thinks that the script is crap, as they try to find Baffie’s lost car keys. Yes, that’s right, they spend eighty minutes trying to find Baffie’s car keys and I won’t spoil the obviously huge plot twist that the keys were in his left pocket.
The movie moves from one madcap situation to another without making any real sense. The dialog is fast paced and after a while even this gets on your nerves. There are a lot of clever ideas and you have to be impressed at the scope and the number of different movie techniques used throughout but at some point you want Baffie to stick his hand in his left pocket to end his inner journey of seeking true identity and rites of passage.
