Visiteurs, Les
Entry updated 2 September 2024. Tagged: Film.
French film (1993; vt The Visitors). Gaumont. Directed by Jean-Marie Poiré. Written by Jean-Marie Poiré and Christian Clavier. Cast includes Christian Bujeau, Marie-Anne Chazel, Christian Clavier, Valérie Lemercier, Isabelle Nanty and Jean Reno. 107 minutes. Colour.
In 1123, Count Godefroy de Montmirail (Reno) is promised to be married to Frénégonde de Pouilles (Lemercier), a duke's daughter. A witch he has captured pours a potion into his drink, causing him to mistake his future father-in-law for a bear chasing Frénégonde and so shoot him with a crossbow. Frénégonde enters a convent in mourning. Godefroy and his squire Jacquouille (Clavier) seek out a wizard to take them back to just before the fatal accident, so they can avert it. However, the wizard misses out a vital ingredient and the pair are transported to contemporary France (see Time Travel). Here they encounter Béatrice (also Lermercier), a descendant of Frénégonde, who obviously does not believe their tale; Jacquart (also Clavier), a descendant of Jacquouille, who now owns the castle Godefroy lived in, much to Godefroy's disgust; and Ginette (Chazel), a homeless woman in whom Jacquouille sees a kindred spirit, the treatment of the homeless being compared to that of serfs in medieval times. After many shenanigans, Godefroy finds a potion to send him back to his own time, where he arrives just in time to avert the crossbow that killed Frénégonde's father, freeing him to marry her. Jacquouille refuses to go back to a time when he was a servant, and surreptitiously swaps places with Jacquart, who is sent to 1123.
Demonstrating that slapstick and fish-out-of-water Humour never go out of fashion, Les Visiteurs was a huge hit in France, and travelled well abroad. Scenes in which the time travellers destroy a car, enter a church on horseback, battle modern policemen with jousting techniques, discover bathing, and encounter modern devices like a telephone, are predictable but undeniably funny. This film established action film hero Reno as a comedy actor; the rest of the cast enjoy playing it very broadly. Cast and director reunited for Les Visiteurs II: Les Couloirs du temps (1998; vt The Visitors II: The Corridors of Time), which was also very successful at the box office; and Les Visiteurs: La Révolution (2016; vt The Visitors: Bastille Day), which flopped. Reno and Clavier also starred in the inevitable US remake, Just Visiting (2001), directed by Jean-Marie Gaubert, which made few waves commercially and was soon forgotten. [CWa]
links
previous versions of this entry