Les époux ripoux (1991) (TV)

User Rating:

4.9/10   

Director:

Carol Wiseman

Writer:

Grant Morris (writer)

Release Date:

29 January 1992 (France)

Genre:

Comedy

Plot:

It's a green-card marriage romance. Deena, an American standup comic living in Paris, has an expired visa...

Plot Keywords:

Paris | Stand Up Comedy | Independent Film

Cast

Patsy Kensit	...	Deena
Stéphane Freiss	...	Nick
Mouss Diouf	...	Booker
Anne-Marie Pisani	...	Claire
Joseph Momo	...	Malik
Jean-Marc Truong	...	Hong
An Luu	...	Thuy Lan
Mapi Galán	...	Maria
Fedele Papalia	...	Valenti
André Chaumeau	...	Fournier
Pierre Belot	...	Charles
Laura Benson	...	Helene
Loic Brabant	...	Thierry
Hugues Profy	...	Carlo
Maïté Nahyr	...	Anna Liebman

Also Known As:

Does This Mean We're Married? (USA)
Un drôle de contrat (France)

Runtime:

94 min

Country:

France | USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Iceland:L | Argentina:13 | USA:PG-13

Filming Locations:

Paris, France

Company:

Canal+

So bad it's really bad

I happened to catch this movie on a Sunday afternoon, and boy was I rewarded. This is a mind-bendingly awful film. It's so cheap and cheesy, it literally stops the channel surfer in mid button-smash. You just have to stop. You have to. The first thing I noticed was the frightful sound mix. If you wonder what Sound Mixing is at Oscar time, this is a good place to learn. The sound mix in this film is what the Oscar voters are not looking for. Listen to the sudden surges in volume. Listen to how the timbre of voices shift, like the way a trumpet sounds when you vary the mute, low then high, closed then open. This is bad sound mixing. It seems like more than 50% of this turkey was looped (dubbed). There is no naturalistic sound in this whole thing.

I'm not going to even start dealing with the plot. Forget the plot. It's idiotic. It's a Green Card Comedy. That's as much as I can say. But let's talk about the script. I don't know if a worse script has ever been produced. The dialogue is uncannily like a 6th grader's concept of movie talk. There are sudden bursts of words that escape the French actor's mouth that defy elevation to sensible speech. He's like the world's most embarrassing person. This holds for both his character, which exudes Gallic slime, and the actor himself who just seems intensely fey.

I can see what happened to Patsy Kensit's career. The girl never got good parts after awhile. She was in some high-profile films, but nothing seems to have panned out for her. There is nothing wrong with her skills. She's quite good. She is not nude in the version I saw, but that would not have really added much to the goings on (OK, yeah, it would have help a lot. Sorry, I got carried away). But catch enough of these kinds of turkeys, and a girl's bound to get a feeling she's being buried alive. Ms. Kensit is now in a successful, long-running English soap called Emmerdale. That's heaven for an actor. The idea of being a huge star eventually passes with youth, and now that she is closing in on 40 I am sure that she is glad to be on a good TV show. She does a valiant job in this thing, but to no avail.

Anyway, I hope you all get a chance to see this movie. If you're like me at all, you need the laughs.