Les Chinois à Paris (1974)
Directed by Jean Yanne

Film Review

Jean Yanne's most virulent assault on his fellow countrymen came with his third and most ambitious satirical feature, Les Chinois à Paris.  Inspired by Robert Beauvais's book Quand les Chinois... (1966), Yanne uses the far-fetched fiction of a Chinese invasion of France to deliver the most scathing of commentaries on the behaviour of the French people at the time of the Nazi occupation (1940-1944).  It was only two years before this that Marcel Ophüls's Le Chagrin et la pitié (1971) had its first theatrical release, after its planned airing on the state-owned French television channel ORTF had been vetoed by its board of directors. Ophüls's film, which purported to relate what actually happened in France during the war, as opposed to the fiction created afterwards by President de Gaulle, was to have seismic implications, and when Yanne's film came out not long afterwards it poured even more fat into an overheated frying pan, with predictable results.

Much of the criticism that came Yanne's way was hurled at him by left-wing militants appalled by what they saw as a vulgar, ill-informed onslaught on Maoism, but there was as much opprobrium from those who took umbrage at his attempts to find humour in what was still a highly sensitive subject, namely the Occupation.  For the most part, Yanne presents the invading Chinese in a positive light (they are a humane, civilised race who seem to have an aversion to violence and end up being corrupted by the French!) and reserves most of his barbed mockery for the occupied French, who, having submitted to the invasion, go on to derive as much personal gain as they can from it.  The Occupation becomes an easy excuse for appalling behaviour which would scarcely be tolerated by any society in normal circumstances, and one suspects the reason why the film met with such a fierce backlash was because it was far closer to the truth than most French people would dare to admit.  The shame of the Occupation was not the surrender but the gutless, self-serving complicity that it engendered among a far from insignificant sector of the population.

Prior to Les Chinois à Paris, Jean Yanne had made two films in which his personal anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist sentiments are readily apparent, along with a certain scepticism as to the efficacy of left-wing politics in putting things right and creating a better society.  Yanne's political ambivalence is even more strongly felt in his third film, which feels like a pitiful cry of despair, an admission that there is something in the French psyche that is fundamentally rotten and can never be put right.  His condemnation may have a humorous ring to it but his assessment of French amorality is much harsher, much less forgiving than what we find in Le Chagrin et la pitié, and stripped of its manic forays into farce and absurdity, the film would be intolerably cruel.  Lacking the structure and directness of Yanne's other zany comedies, Les Chinois à Paris struggles to make a coherent statement and ends up resembling just another vague anti-everything rant that is only just redeemed by its boisterous sense of fun (Blier and Serrault are hilarious) and a sly homage to Jean-Luc Godard's Week-End (1967), in which Yanne had previously starred.

Film Synopsis

The Chinese have invaded Europe!  In the ensuing panic, the French President flees to America, leaving the citizens of France, who are forced to manufacture pipes, to rediscover the joys of denunciation and hypocrisy.  Meanwhile, General Pou-Yen sets up his government at the Lafayette Galleries in Paris.  It's a return to the good old days, with blackmarketeers thriving, along with other unscrupulous so-and-sos who know how to turn a bad situation to their advantage - men like Régis Forneret, who converts his sex shop into a Chinese restaurant.  Now that cars have been outlawed, Forneret realises that he can make a fortune by selling rickshaws.  But the Chinese overlords are finding it increasingly difficult to restrain the wicked ways of their French minions, and soon begin to fall prey to their vices.  Even the austere Pou-Yen weakens as he succumbs to the charms of Stéphanie Lefranc, the beautiful secretary of the industrialist Grégoire Montclair.  In the end, he allows himself to be persuaded by Forneret that he should allow the French to wallow in their cesspit of debauchery.  But what will become of those who have been won over by Marxist-Leninist ideology..?