... at the sheer ineptness of the story, direction, everything in fact. I was at the same screening as the other person who has posted here and it's clear that we were watching different films, either that or he/she is easily pleased. Odoul has taken a great actor, Pierre Richard, now well into his old age and made him, in what purports to be a straight film, far more of a buffoon than he ever was when he played the foil to Gerard Depardieu in such classic Francis Veber movies as Le Chevre, Les Fugitifs and Les Comperes. Odoul seems to be trying to set French film-making back forty years to the days of the self-indulgent but talentless Jean-Luc Godard, whose idea of movie making was to take a hand-held camera on to the streets and follow Jean-Paul Belmondo walking around Paris for 90 minutes. The only real difference is that here Odoul sets his story, such as it is, in a château where the Lear-like Richard lives with a literal fool. For reasons best known to Odoul (or maybe not) Richard sees fit to hire, like Hamlet, a troupe of players to enact not the death of his father, but his own. Take two Shakespearean references, throw in a touch of the Samuel Becketts and you too can be the darling of the pseuds.
Review of En attendant le déluge
