À bras ouverts (2017)
Directed by Philippe de Chauveron

Film Review

After the phenomenal success of Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu? at the French box office in 2014 (it attracted an audience of 12.4 million), director Philippe de Chauveron must have thought he had struck gold with his particular brand of overt racism masquerading as popular entertainment.  He followed his 2014 hit up with more of the same, first Débarquement immédiat (2016), and then À bras ouverts (a.k.a. Open Arms), plumbing the depths like no other French filmmaker before him.  Can it be a coincidence that the director's name sounds like chauvinism?

What is hard to fathom is why Christian Clavier and Elsa Zylberstein, two intelligent and successful actors who have no difficulty attracting offers of work, should agree to appear in such bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping fare as this.  Not only is the film offensive (to anyone who is not a card-carrying member of the most extreme right-wing political party), it isn't remotely funny and seems to have been thrown together in an afternoon by a half-hearted and completely talentless film student.  Clavier's character (an obvious caricature of the self-promoting philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy) is a ludicrously shallow hypocrite who just cannot help committing one racist faux pas after another.

Worse, the Romany gypsies who have the imprudence to bed down in Clavier's garden are presented in the most unsympathetic light, not as human beings but as mole-eating weirdoes who may just have well have come from another planet.  There is an Indian butler (a carbon copy of the bearer character played by Michael Bates in the BBC television series It Ain't Half Hot Mum in the 1970s) who glibly endorses white supremacy to such a degree that he cannot bring himself to serve anyone of dark complexion.  And we mustn't forget Elsa Zylberstein as Clavier's well-heeled wife, a woman of artistic pretensions who has absolutely no interest in the world around her - a sorry emblem of bourgeois intellectual complacency.

À bras ouverts is an extraordinary film, and I mean that in the worst possible sense.  It is extraordinary that such a flagrantly racist accumulation of puerile ill-conceived dross could ever have entered anyone's head, let alone made it into a film and allowed to go on general release across France.  It's hard to imagine anything more irresponsible and socially damaging, at a time when anti-immigrant and racist sentiment is at an all-time high and centrist politicians of all colours are failing lamentably to arrest the electorate's inexorable migration towards the far right.

This is the kind of film that reminds you of those abysmal anti-Semitic films commissioned by the Nazis in the 1930s and '40s, monstrous attempts to dehumanise 'the other' and make it terrifyingly easy for Hitler's Final Solution to become a reality.  The mainstream success of Philippe de Chauveron and filmmakers of his ilk should be a cause for concern for us all.  Their flagrantly xenophobic brand of lowbrow comedy can only have the effect of normalising racism and further aggravating anti-immigrant feeling in France.  Laugh if you want to, but it seems to me that we are slowly heading towards Holocaust 2.0.

Film Synopsis

Jean-Etienne Fougerole is a prominent figure of France's literary scene, an intellectual humanist married to a wealthy heiress who, unlike him, has scant interest in the problems of the world.  To promote his latest book, À bras ouverts, Fougerole appears on television and uses this as an opportunity to articulate his view that it is the duty of the well-off to welcome less advantaged people into their homes.  Fougerole's critics take him at his word and the writer has no choice but to give out his home address to his television audience as a gesture of his good faith.  Not long afterwards, the Fougerole household is disturbed by the sudden appearance of the Bariks, a family of travellers who have decided by park their caravan in the Fougeroles ample gardens.  Jean-Etienne's wife tries to put on a brave face, although it is no secret that she shares none of her husband's concerns for the plight of the world's poor.  With the best of intentions, Fougerole has placed himself in a predicament that will make a martyr of any humanist do-gooder.  Of the course, the Bariks intend to make the most of the opportunity that Fate has granted them, repaying their benefactor's generosity in ways he hadn't even imagined...