Review of Drôle de drame

This is a really strange film tailored exclusively to Gallic tastes and humour, and not wholly comprehensible to the rest of us. It is not in any particular genre, and is extremely difficult to describe. Based on the 1937 novel by Storer Clouston 'His First Offence', the script is by Jacques Prevert, who wrote 'Les Enfants du Paradis' and 'Le Quai des Brunes', and did numerous films with the brilliant director Marcel Carne. In this film, they wander off into fantasyland with a flavour of Rene Clair about it. Jean-Louis Barrault, always compulsive viewing, here plays a psychopathic murderer who longs to tell everyone about it. (He only kills butchers, because they kill animals, as he enthusiastically says with wide-open, eager and innocent eyes.) Barrault's lithe physical movements and performance are spell-binding. Michel Simon is utterly charming as an old codger who lives two contradictory lives. The costumes of this bizarre tale are outlandish and overblown fantasy creations, and remind one of circus clowns. The whole thing is a kind of joke, an antidote perhaps to 'Le Quai des Brunes' with its gloom. This is very much a 'let's go out and play!' type of project, set in 'a faraway land of which we know nothing', otherwise called Victorian London. 'Express Dairy' and 'Bed and Breakfast' signs appear as faux touches of authenticity in such strange settings as Limehouse, the old China Town, complete with slinking Orientals who smash people over the head to steal their lapel buttonhole flowers in order to make up a vase-full, one by one. There is nothing at all normal anywhere in this tale, from the feeding of flies one by one to carnivorous plants (stuffed down their gullets), the delicate tending of a mimosa bush which is then dug up to look for a buried body, a kitchen full of one hundred unopened milk bottles, a bishop who disguises himself as a Highlander in a kilt, a man who is 'not recognised' simply by putting on a false beard, various people accused of murder when no murder can be proved because no one has died, and so on. It is a veritable parade of impossible fantasies, strung out on a washing line for our amused inspection. Prevert was clearly pulling a Surrealist stunt here. The mannered acting of most of the characters may be hilarious to the French (or perhaps the French of 1937 anyway), but to us is more like what we would expect to see in a school play. This appears to be an attempt to make a 'French farce'. I dunno ...