Chamboultout is a José Garcia festival (review)

To (re) see this Sunday on TF1.

Return to TV this weekend from Chamboultouta comedy by Eric Lavaine with Alexandra Lamy (with whom he had already collaborated on Back to my mother And Spoiled for choice), but also José Garcia, in great shape. Released in the spring of 2019, it had surprised Firstas you can read in our review.

In 98, Les Têtes Riges released an album that heralded a bright future. Chamboultou plunged the spectator into the heart of a funny paradox: mixing popular music and arty delirium (precious and abstruse language) to finally leave everything in order and… not upset anything. It is the same impression of strangeness which dominates before the Chamboultout (with a t this time) by Éric Lavaine.

It begins as a “drama”. A guy has an accident and wakes up blind, with memory loss and above all the annoying tendency to say aloud what everyone normally says quietly. It’s a José Garcia festival, a nasty, funny and acidic segment, where we laugh a lot despite the context. Until the second film which begins quickly, that of Béatrice, his wife who is releasing a book on her new life. The book will cause concern and controversy among his family and friends who will all look for the slightest clue betraying their presence among the characters.

This part works like a killing game. To put it quickly, we go from an Italian comedy to a very French drama, the settling of scores between friends, questioning autofiction and its limits. All these characters, often uneducated, mindless or odious, are locked up in a house in the South-West (any resemblance to The Little Handkerchiefs de Canet seems fortuitous) and leads us into their own jealousy, depression or mediocrity. It’s not really satire, nor a reflection on the bonds of friendship. And above all it does not upset much. There remains the number of José Garcia, the evil spirit of Lavaine and Alexandra Lamy always solar.

The trailer of Chamboultout :

Chamboultout – Alexandra Lamy: “We shouldn’t have made this film together”