Carambolages

Carambolages is a mildly amusing French look at climbing the corporate ladder. Brialy is the subservient brown-nosing youngster who needs quick advancement up the hierarchy to pay for the modern lifestyle he is buying on credit. Seeing that marrying his immediate superior's daughter will not get him the results he wants, he begins plotting the demise of the head of the company. The company itself specializes in holiday travel and unscrupulously brutalizes its customers for maximum profit, spending more thought on publicity gimmicks than customer service, and de Funes is good as the head of the company, perpetually distracted except when scheming to terrorize his customers or to dispose of the man having an affair with his wife. Nothing goes as planned, this being a comedy, but there are enough murderous ploys going around to take out quite a few of Brialy's obstacles. Corporate culture seems to have been branded as a primarily American phenomenon by the U.S. films of the '60s, and this was a refreshingly different view. Not what I consider screamingly funny, but amusing enough, and fun to watch.