Effacer l’historique (2020)

Directed by: Benoît Delépine, Gustave Kervern | 105 minutes | comedy, drama | Actors: Blanche Gardin, Denis Podalydès, Corinne Masiero, Vincent Lacoste, Benoît Poelvoorde, Jackie Berroyer, Jean-Louis Barcelona, ​​Jean Dujardin, Lucas Mondher, Miss Ming, Monique Leroux, Jo Dahan, Bouli Lanners, Michel Houellebecq

Even for intelligent people, the digital world is sometimes difficult to understand. Fake news, dubious web shops, Nigerian princes, free bitcoins. If reasonably intelligent people have trouble with this, what about the least intelligent part of the population?

This serious problem is hilariously dealt with in the French comedy ‘Effacer l’historique’. In a village in France, three not too bright fellow residents have to deal with various forms of digital misery. Divorced mother Marie faces blackmail over a sex tape. The daughter of Bertrand in her forties is at home because she was bullied at school by a cyberbully. And then there’s the unattractive and socially chunky taxi driver Christine, whose customers invariably rank her with 1 skinny asterisk.

Those issues are serious enough, but the effect is only comical. Take the company Christine works for, the Hollywood VIP Star Cars. Despite that fancy name, these are ordinary cars, with a moth-eaten red carpet rolling out when you get out. Or take the gullible Bertrand, a man who firmly claims that his insurer reimburses his costs for 250%. Most beautiful of the bunch is Marie, a fantastic fuckup who travels to America to pay Google. With hilarious consequences.

The humor is idiosyncratic, slightly absurd, but almost always spot on. There is a great scene with a translation app, we see a divine hacker at work in a windmill, there is a natural history museum in Mauritius with some very curious fish, we see a silly digital sweatshop and we get a funny bonus after the credits . Yet the message is serious enough. Halfway through, our unfortunate trio appears to have participated in the curious ‘yellow vest’ protests in 2018. And suddenly we understand what those protests were (partly) about and why they seemed so unfocused.

Unfortunately, the storyline of Christine is not well developed and the humor is occasionally too corny. But the biggest problem with this film is its temporality. ‘Effacer l’historique’ is about the digital problems of the 1920s, which are undoubtedly very different from those of the 1930s. So there is a good chance that this comedy will quickly become outdated. But for viewers from the 1920s, this is an intelligent, original and striking satire that will leave you with a big smile.