Les Tuche 4 and Tuchemania: “Unconsciously, we wanted to make The Simpsons at the cinema”

In three films, the Tuches have robbed the box office and become the emblem of a certain France. Director Olivier Baroux and his screenwriters analyze “Tuchemania” and its recipe for us.

Updated December 3, 2023: This Sunday, TF1 will broadcast for the first time Les Tuches 4 clearly on television. At the end of 2021, when the film was released on the big screen, First had met its creators. Flashback, while waiting The Tuches 5which will send the little family to the United Kingdom to meet the royal family.

Interview from December 6, 2021: No matter how much you twist the problem in every direction, the facts are there: the Tuches are superstars. Popular icons whose growing success in theaters over the past ten years has been somewhat dizzying (1.4 million admissions for the first film, 4.6 million for the second, 5.5 million for the third). “ My initial idea was just to talk about a somewhat atypical family with contrarian values, whose father is very proud of being unemployed. Telling about a region that was not necessarily the North, as one might think, but a place in which most people could find themselves », remembers screenwriter Philippe Mechelen, who cut his teeth on Canal+, in Burger Quiz And The horns of info. The triggering event is rather basic: a working-class family who wins the Loto and moves to Monaco. “ But it allowed us to take the characters somewhere else, it was a very comic book idea! In fact, the Tuches are comic book characters who find themselves in a very real universe. »

A triumphant broadcast on TF1 and spectacular DVD sales made this French saga a bizarre social phenomenon, which far exceeded the expectations of its creators. The same scenario used by Quentin Dupieux or the Farrelly brothers (if you look closely, you’re never very far from it) would have very painfully exceeded 400,000 admissions… But what should have been a niche film about idiots funny exploded the counters. The public identified with these barred characters whose ritual is to eat “ fries, fries, fries ”, with “ samurai sauce, the stinking mayonnaise “. Still on the edge of pure bullshit. “ But there is a “masked avenger” side to them, like in Les Guignols. It serves as an outlet. You’re beating up a politician, powerful people, the World Company… There, it’s the Tuches who are doing it. It’s Jeff, who has become a multimillionaire, who can go to his banker and say: “Do you take these kinds of checks?” It’s a fantasy we’ve all had. There were advertisements for the Lottery that were based solely on that! The fact remains that Jeff, even when he has all this money on him, he still defends his unemployed status. (Laughs.) And people like it. » To the point of infusing it into all social classes.

“ Obviously, basically, we have a very popular audience. But the more time passes, the more people from different backgrounds tell me that they love Tuche. It goes from the investigating judge to the big company boss, including the workeranalyzes director Olivier Baroux. And, systematically, it was their children who introduced them to it. The success of the Tuches comes from them. » It’s not illogical that these films resonate with young people: “ The Tuches are kids, very innocent people. When Jeff Tuche is elected President of the Republic and he thinks he can make the CAC 40 pay a percentage to make up France’s deficit, he is totally in a schoolyard. He said to himself: “Well, it’s going to work.” The Tuches try to face the world as it is, with their own values. »

5 things to know about Les Tuche

Tuche culture

In three feature films, the Tuches visited Monaco and Los Angeles, before settling at the Élysée. The fourth part brings Jeff and his family back to their imaginary town of Bouzolles, at the heart of a Christmas war between Gafam and local businesses. The saga therefore continues to be built on diametrically opposed visions of the world, in a permanent acrobatics between cartoonish jokes and the need to please as many people as possible, total delirium and the obligation to connect to a certain form of reality. Not contradictory, but not far. “ What is important is to take these characters out of their environmentsummarizes Philippe Mechelen. In the first film, we made them realize all their fantasies, but Tuche fantasies with their Tuche culture, their universe, their obsessions, their gimmicks, their fries. They are so unusual that you can take them wherever you want, they will stay the same. And it’s this clash with the rest of the world that’s normally supposed to create comedy. »

To test the jokes, nothing better than Jeff Tuche himself, Jean-Paul Rouve, who participates in the writing phase. “The huge advantage of having Jean-Paul with us is that when we look for situations or dialogues, he plays them for us immediately. We have direct feedback, we know if it works and if we can pull on this thread,” explains Olivier Baroux. “ There is a software from Tuche which is really particular but wonderful and delightfulabounds Julien Hervé, co-writer since Les Tuches 2. You know that Jeff, faced with a given situation, will undoubtedly be the only one in France to react in this way. And when you find the thing, and we’re all laughing in the writing room, we know we’ve got something, that it sounds like Jeff. So you dig a little deeper, and you try to be fair with your characters. To honor them. »

It’s obviously more complicated than that: the screenwriters stubbornly keep the course of “laughing with” rather than “laughing against”. Paying off the Tuches’ face seems sincerely unthinkable to them. But then who are we kidding, exactly? “ If we have to laugh at someone, it is rather at those who are opposite the Tuches, who we caricature with a fairly thick lineassures Philippe Mechelen. I know that this is a family that leaves no one indifferent and that there can be somewhat knee-jerk reactions… Besides, we are often accused of making fun of them. But this is not at all the case, that would be extremely cynical. »

For Olivier Baroux, “ these remarks gradually disappeared over the course of the films. At first sight, I can understand why some people think: “But what a bunch of rednecks.” Except that over time, most people understood what we were doing, that we loved our characters. A little unconsciously, we wanted to make The Simpsons in the cinema. We are not making fun of the “average Frenchman”, if indeed he exists. We wanted to show a family that was a bit punk, adding something to make people react. And above all, they laugh. »

Back to Bouzolles

The fact remains that the more the cinemas fill up, the more the pressure mounts. How can we go further than the presidency of the Republic? At the end of Key 3, in a post-credits scene in the form of a gag, Jeff Tuche becomes Pope. Okay… And then what? We had to go back to the sources, where it all began: Bouzolles. The writing of Key 4 seems to have been a little ordeal (“ We struggled a lot. Really. It was long and complicated. But, in the end, we are very proud of it », says the director), with the obligation to renew the stock of valves and the desire to offer a Christmas story “ more acidic “. “ But how do we bring confrontation and opposition into this?asks Mechelen. Since in Bouzolles, you only have people like the Tuches who, what’s more, shared their fortune with everyone. The whole village is super rich! It was hard. The alternative would have been, for example, to have Christmas in Dubai. And there we go, we write this with our eyes closed! Except that we wanted to tell something else. »

Olivier Baroux specifies: “ In any case, we know exactly what we really don’t want to do: the Tuches on skis, at a holiday club, or on the Moon. If we sent them to the mountains, we would feel like we were doing sub-Tanned. But it is true that it will be more and more difficult to surprise. » So the creators of Tuche chart their course, avoiding reading reviews from a certain press – while still keeping an eye on the stars Allocinated -, with the objective of never breaking the pact made with the public. To hear them, the recipe for a film Tuche appears to be extremely precise. Which leaves an overall limited room for maneuver: “ We are careful to keep the line of what the Tuche are. We don’t even ask ourselves the question of directing them towards another genre of cinema or another style of narration.promises Baroux. The Tuche will remain the Tuche. But we avoid assuming that every film must be a big success. Because if we start to wonder what people will think or like, we get into an advertising or market research thing… and inspiration drops to zero. »

Jean-Paul Rouve completely takes over Les Tuche for the 5th film