Adieu les cons (2020)

Directed by: Albert Dupontel | 87 minutes | comedy, drama | Actors: Virginie Efira, Albert Dupontel, Nicolas Marié, Jackie Berroyer, Philippe Uchan, Bastien Ughetto, Marilou Aussilloux, Michel Vuillermoz, Laurent Stocker, Kyan Khojandi, Grégoire Ludig, David Marsais, Bouli Lanners, Catherine Davenier, Johann Dionnet

Once upon a time, 43-year-old Suze Trappet was a much-older-looking 15-year-old girl with pink dreadlocks and a nose piercing. In the late 1980s, she fell in love with a twenty-year-old boy who looked much younger. The result is a big belly, a lot of drama and a child that she was not even allowed to hold after a difficult birth, but was forced to give up by her parents.

At the start of ‘Adieu les cons’, the French cinema hit that won seven Césars, Suze receives bad news. She doesn’t wait to see how bad the news is. She has things to do. Only one thing really, but during the film it’s like she’s working through an invisible bucket list, she can check off so many bizarre things.

In this fine imaginative film, this has mainly to do with improbable coincidence. In the meantime, filmmaker Albert Dupontel stops a lot of criticism on the tough society that is made up of bureaucratic rules and where humanity is hard to find. If you are not digitized, you no longer count, is the (literal) message. And a complicated last name like Trappet or Cuchas is disastrous.

If you are not yet familiar with the work of Albert Dupontel (‘Au revoir La-Haute’), look for it in the direction of colleagues Terry Gilliam (who makes a comedic supporting role), Jean-Pierre Jeunet or Wes Anderson . The universe in which ‘Adieu les cons’ takes place is similar to ours, but slightly different. Dupontel alternates insanely crazy situations with quiet, moving moments, such as a beautiful scene in which Suze leads her passenger through a city he last saw long ago and where progress has overtaken memory.

‘Adieu les cons’ is smoothly shot, pleasantly eccentric and full of misunderstandings and unexpected encounters. Despite the serious premise, the film never feels melancholy and Dupontel seems to consciously navigate around the tragic undertones. Sometimes that seems to clash a bit, but thanks to the excellent acting – Virginie Efira in particular is wonderfully disarming – the somewhat inconsistent tone of the film is no problem at all. Not for cynics, but for lovers of charming black comedies.