BDE: the new comedy by Michaël Youn, between The 11 Commandments and Project X (review)

All schuss on the black slope of delirium, Youn sets fire to a ski resort. Not entirely successful, but generous with gags.

Broadcast on Prime Video since February 2023, BDE arrives unencrypted on television. First recommend it to you, especially if you like the delirium of Michael Youn (The 11 Commandments, Fatal…) or trashy American comedies. Here is our review, republished on the occasion of its first broadcast on free-to-air television, on M6. Note that Fatal will then be offered in the second part of the evening.

Four friends, who headed the student office at their business school in the early 2000s, meet every year for a regressive retreat. This time, Bob (Michaël Youn) borrowed under false pretenses the luxurious chalet of his father-in-law (Gilbert Melki, 2000% in his caricature) located in Val Thorens. But as soon as they arrive, the small group comes across dozens of students from their old school in the middle of Spring Break, who have come to have an orgiastic party… We imagine you can guess what happens next: the weekend is not going to go as planned , and the station will end in fire and blood. Funny thing that BDEstuck between an avalanche of cracking valves and the acute awareness of being too old for this bullshit (“ Can we be and have been? That's my favorite subject », assured us Youn in these pages in 2020).

The gags follow one another and some stand out from the rest (terrific absurd scene where Vincent Desagnat hurtles down the mountain in a giant ball and vomits on himself), while others are emphasized to the point of emptying them of their substance (a parody of Terminator super hairy, before a passage from Cameron's film is actually shown on a TV screen). And the film suffers from only timidly outlining its dramatic charge – the place of age, lies and ego in our lives –, preferring the more marked path of the comedy of mass destruction. We would have liked to see Youn examine his inner troubles instead of protecting himself with an overlay of regressive humor which made him famous.

BDE, by Michaël Youn, with Michaël Youn, Helena Noguerra, Lucien Jean-Baptiste, Vincent Desagnat… February 24 on Prime Video. Trailer :

Michaël Youn: “With BDE, I wanted to make a crazy film from start to finish”