Combining comedy with social comment requires surefootedness and Coline Serrau proves that she is more than equal to the task in this entry from the early nineties. She was building on the success of her mega hit which translates as Three Men and A Cradle but her initial follow up Romuald et Juliet largely failed to find its audience. Not so with this one which hits most of the targets it aims its scatter-gun at. The premise of a man losing his wife and job on the same day is, of course, the basis for a joke and I personally know several that begin in this way, for Serrau it's also something of a joke but one leavened with social comment and, in retrospect, social history, for it is a fairly accurate of French society in the nineties. Serrau also succeeds in creating yet another male bonding of opposites that almost rivals the Depardieu-Richard duo created by Francis Veber and Vincent Lindon and Patrick Timsit (ironically Timsit appeared in the stage version of Veber's L'Emmerdeur, recreating with Richard Berry the screen partnership of Lino Ventura and Jacques Brel) need not be ashamed to measure their partnership against those of Depardieu-Reno (Tais-toi), Auteuil-Elmahlah (La Doublure) or Auteuil-Boon in Patrice Leconte's Mon meilleur ami. Serrau has surrounded them with quality performers such as Michele Laroque who weighs in with a tour de force tirade in which half the fun is trying to see when she takes a breath. Ultimately, of course, there is nothing funny about mid-life crises or finding oneself both wifeless and jobless at a stroke, just as there's nothing funny about a guy attempting to climb the promotional ladder by lending his apartment to executives for sexual trysts and discovering that his own object of desire, who subsequently attempts suicide, is one of the people involved but cinemas the world over rang with laughter when Billy Wilder's The Apartment was screened just as they did for this fine film by Coline Serrau. I saw it for the first time yesterday - courtesy of a French friend - some fifteen years after its initial release and found it both fresh and excellent.
Review of La crise
