Les Bronzés (1978)
Directed by Patrice Leconte

Film Review

The holiday movie - typified by the popular Camping series of films - has become a mainstay of French cinema over the past few decades, and its success can be traced back to 1978, which saw the release of two very popular entries in the genre - Michel Lang's L'Hôtel de la plage and Patrice Leconte's Les Bronzés.  In contrast to Lang's sentimental nostalgia fest, Leconte's film is a scurrilous piece of satire, intended to mock the recent fashion for holiday clubs in exotic locations, the so-called Club Med phenomenon.

The film was in fact adapted from a stage play entitled Amour, coquillages et crustacés, which was written and performed by Le Splendid, a café-théâtre troupe of actors established in the mid-1970s.  The troupe comprises some very familiar faces - Michel Blanc, Gérard Jugnot, Christian Clavier, Thierry Lhermitte, Josiane Balasko and Marie-Anne Chazel - all of whom went on to lead incredibly successful solo careers, after working together on several notable film comedies of the 1980s, including such classics as Le Père Noël est une ordure (1982) and Papy fait de la résistance (1983).  Patrice Leconte was a close friend of several members of the Splendid team and was invited to direct Les Bronzés on the strength of his previous film, Les Vécés étaient fermés de l'intérieur (1975), which had received a mauling by the critics and almost led him to give up filmmaking for good.

As the film's cheeky theme song (sung by Serge Gainsbourg) implies, sun, sea and sex are the essential constituents of a French holiday in the late 1970s, with the film placing a particular emphasis on the latter of these three - to great humorous effect.  Much of the fun of Les Bronzés is that no one ever manages to get what he or she wants, and most end up far worse off, made even more acutely aware of the vacuity of their existences.  Michel Blanc's character is a particularly tragic creature (a near relation perhaps of the solitary wretch he would later play in Leconte's subsequent film Monsieur Hire) - a man who is so ill-suited for the love game that he might as well give it up and become a monk. 

Blanc's eternal gaffe-prone loser may be pathetic, but he is scarcely more worthy of our sympathy than the other specimens of manhood struggling to satiate their over-developed libidos.  Lhermitte's Popeye has good looks, an appealing physique and an engaging personality, but for all that he seems fated to end up as the eternal skirt chaser, never knowing what true love is, nor ever seeming to care.  Even sadder, Luis Rego's amiable clown Bobo is as second rate a romantic as he is a second rate entertainer.  He can always attract sympathetic females with his piteous Fernandel-like persona, but he is bound to end up as Fernandel did in most of his films, alone and bruised.

Unlike the Splendid troupe's subsequent films (including the much funnier sequel Les Bronzés font du ski), this film eschews outright farce and facile caricature in favour of a more down-to-earth approach which allows the characters and their situation to be readily believable, and this is perhaps the film's main selling point.  The film is certainly not without humour - the highpoints being the dialogue couplet 'Bonsoir, nous allons nous coucher!', 'Bonsoir, nous allons les niquer!', and the famous sequence in which Michel Blanc is forcibly robbed of his swimming trunks and has to cover his embarrassment with copious amounts of seaweed. But the humour doesn't intrude to the extent that it prevents the film from being true to life.

Les Bronzés is a pretty minor work in Patrice Leconte's oeuvre - easily eclipsed by his later achievements, Le Mari de la coiffeuse and Le Parfum d'Yvonne - but it bears his familiar hallmark in its honest reflections on life and the authentic character interplay.  Far from being the riotous irreverent comedy you might have expected (going by the Splendid's subsequent films), it is a surprisingly low-key comedy that is as likely to provoke melancholic introspection as laughter. The film's audience of 2.3 million was impressive at the time but it now seems small beer indeed compared with the 11.1 million that its second sequel Les Bronzés 3 - amis pour la vie notched up in 2006.

Film Synopsis

In the late 1970s, a party of hyped up French holidaymakers arrives at a popular holiday club on the Ivory Coast, looking forward to a week of unbridled escape from their humdrum lives.  Among them are Jérôme, Gigi, Christiane, Jean-Claude and Bernard.  The latter is glad to be reunited with his wife Nathalie, who arrived the week before and has taken a liking to her newfound freedom.  The job of keeping these pleasure seekers amused and occupied falls to two entertainers - Bobo and Bourseault - and the dishy sports organiser Popeye.  Most of the holidaymakers are fixated on having at least one new amorous conquest before the week is out, and Popeye and his colleagues are more than willing to help out in this department, providing the individual concerned is female and reasonably attractive.

Socially inept bachelor Jean-Claude is the member of the party who is most desperate to satisfy his libidinous needs, but everything would seem to be against him.  Allergic to just about everything under the sun (including the sun) and too conscious of his distinctly unmasculine physique, he is incapable of showing bare flesh (except when he is cruelly stripped naked by his fellow hedonists).  Worse, every chat-up line that enters his head is guaranteed to drive away any female on the planet.  Popeye has no such problems and is a magnet for all women in need of some no-strings fun and frolics.  Nathalie succumbs all too easily to his obvious charms, but how will Bernard react when he learns that his wife has taken a liking to cheating on him...?