Drôle de samedi (1985)
Directed by Tunç Okan

Film Review

Drôle de samedi is a zany little French comedy inspired by Friedrich Dürrenmatt's short story Die Wurst.  The film was directed by the Turkish actor-turned filmmaker Tunç Okan (here credited under his pseudonym Bay Okan), who also appears in the film as the world's most efficient pickup artist. Surprisingly, for such a modest and fairly unappreciated comedy, the film has a stellar ensemble cast that includes Jacques Villeret, Francis Huster, Carole Laure, Michel Blanc and Jean-Luc Bideau - all big name actors at the time the film was made in the mid-80s.  Okan's idiosyncratic humour resembles an odd mix of Jacques Tati, Otar Iosseliani and Monty Python - traditional French farce thickly laced with quirky theatre of the absurd.

The film begins with a man (Jacques Villeret) being tried for the murder of his wife. What shocks the jury (and us) is not that this seemingly harmless individual killed his spouse, but that he subsequently turned her into sausage meat. It takes some time for this surreal opening to be explained, and it finally turns out to be just a dream experienced by a butcher named Maurice who is experiencing some extreme form of mid-life crisis. Back in the real world, we find ourseves one Saturday morning in the genteel Swiss town of Neuchâtel.  An ordinary-looking couple, Véronique and Pierre, expect nothing out of the ordinary when they embark on their customary weekend shop.  Before they face the ordeal of the supermarket, Pierre has a dental appointment - he decides his toothache isn't so serious after all when he hears the dentist bawling at a patient who refuses to open his mouth.  The couple are then menaced by the aforementioned butcher, who, prompted by his bizarre dream, decides to go on a killer rampage.

Luckily for the hapless couple, Maurice only kills other butchers, so they live to face another trial in a camera shop, where they must wait patiently whilst the shop assistant shows every camera he has in stock to a man who then decides the purchase is too complicated.  Feeling peckish, Véronique and Pierre dive into a little restaurant whose owner is at first reluctant to serve them.  The waiter protests against this display of bad service and before they know it the couple are being treated like royalty.  This mostly uneventful day continues with Pierre being wrongly arrested for shoplifting by an over-zealous store detective.  Pierre gets his own back by stealing a bar of chocolate.  The trip to the supermarket ends with Pierre abandoning his trolley with the week's groceries and walking away in disgust.  Surely there's more to life than this pointless saga of mundanity? Actually, no...

It's not the most sophisticated of comedies, just a loosely cobbled together series of sketches that just about adds up to the crudest of satires on modern life.  The scattergun humour pays off in a few scenes which combine wild slapstick and black comedy to hilarious effect - notably the sequence in which Villeret goes on a killer rampage and starts chasing after a fellow butcher, in the manner of a Benny Hill sketch.  There's a weird scene where a toddler turns into a psychopath and starts destroying anything that his kindergarten minder refers to as a toy.  No less surreal is an earlier scene in which a dentists goes bananas when an irritating child patient refuses to open his mouth unless he is given the chemical formula of the anaesthetic.  Drôle de samedi is pretty aimless and contains a high quotient of misfired gags but its random moments of hilarity and all-round weirdness make up for this.  This is to the 1980s what Claude Faraldo's Themroc (1973) was to the 1970s - an attempt to draw our attention to the anarchy that lies just beneath the surface of our apparently well-ordered lives.