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Casque bleu
1994 Comedy / Drama / Adventure
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Credits
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Director: Gérard Jugnot
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Script: Christian Biegalski, Gérard Jugnot, Philippe Lopes-Curval
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Photo: Gérard de Battista
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Music: Yves de Bujadoux
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Cast: Gérard Jugnot (Patrick),
Victoria Abril (Alicia),
Valérie Lemercier (Laurette),
Jean-Pierre Cassel (Nicolas),
Micheline Presle (Gisèle),
Claude Piéplu (Pierre),
Jean-Noël Brouté (Daniel),
Roland Marchisio (Freddy),
Hubert Saint-Macary (Gianni),
Chus Lampreave (Alicia's Mother),
Marian Apaolaza (Madame Momo)
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Country: France
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Language: French
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Runtime: 98 min
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Aka: Blue Helmet
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Summary
Winegrower Patrick Ponsac comes close to ruining his marriage when he has an affair with
another woman. By way of atonement, he takes his wife back to the Mediterranean
island where, 13 years earlier, they spent their honeymoon. Not such a good move,
as it turns out. The peacemaking holiday coincides with the outbreak of a bloody
civil war. Having failed to leave the country, Patrick, his wife and their eccentric
entourage are taken hostage by merciless guerrillas…
Review
With four full-length films comfortably under his directorial belt, Gérard Jugnot
is starting to exude the confidence of a man who isn’t going to let good taste or squeamish
gutter-press-informed public sensibilities get in the way of a good film. The first
part of Casque bleu looks like another instalment
in the Les
Bronzés series of films, with the same tepid comedy and parodied characters
having fun in a sumptuous exotic location. Just when the film appears to have
settled into a comfortable, albeit dull, groove, it goes off in a totally different direction,
and thereafter tries to look on the sunnier side of a gruesome civil war and hostage situation.
This sounds pretty grim, but Jugnot is careful not to cause offence, perhaps a little
too careful. It’s interesting to compare this film with Jugnot’s subsequent
Faillait pas…!, a light-hearted romp closely
based on true-life ritual mass suicide, in which any notion of good taste was soundly
strangled at birth (before being decapitated, dissolved in acid and flushed down the toilet).
Casque bleu is by contrast pretty mild stuff,
the most shocking thing probably being what Micheline Presle is given to wear.
It would be easy to write this film off as just another bog-standard French comedy – a
muddle of implausible plot developments, shallow characterisation and lowbrow humour.
On the strength of Jugnot’s earlier films, one is, however, driven to read more into it
than this. Could the film not be a timely comment on the complacency of the supposedly
civilised West, a critique on how it reacts to external conflict and protects its own
interests? When a crisis erupts in a developing country, the first reaction
of the Western nations is to evacuate its own citizens (thereby hampering legitimate refugee
activity) and then either to do absolutely nothing (on the assumption that Time is a much
better healer than the U.N.) or totally the wrong thing (i.e. start dropping bombs, often
on innocent civilians). Jugnot manages to get some of this across in the film, but
perhaps not as forcefully as he might. He would doubtless have been more daring
if he had made the film after the events of 2003
(i.e. if the Iraq Invasion and not the Balkans War had been his inspiration).
The presence of so many big name film actors in the cast list is a sure sign that the
production team was far more preoccupied with entertaining a mainstream French audience
than lecturing them on the double standards of the West. That said, it’s not
a bad film. The performances are okay, the script and direction are certainly no
worse than a comparable Hollywood offering. However, it’s most likely the haphazard
off-the-wall comedy and the wonderful Micheline Presle / Claude Piéplu double act
(repeated in Fallait Pas…!) which ultimately
sells the film. It's just a pity that the deeper political messages are so muted.
© James Travers 2007
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