When an officer is called away to war, his fiancee starts to pine. Indeed, her bouts of anger, ennui and sadness become so serious that her relatives begin to fear for her safety. Since no letters from the front are forthcoming, the fiancee's sister decides to write the letters herself, under the officer's name. As week follows week and month follows month, it becomes necessary to invent ever wilder stories about manly derring-do, secret missions and exotic expeditions...
A very funny comedy with enchanting lead performances and an inventive screenplay filled with twists and turns. (I had been fearing some pseudo-Jane Austen cr*p, but thankfully this was not the case.) The beautiful costumes and locations add greatly to the visual charm of the movie. Indeed, they are so good that they might feature in a "straight" history movie or historical drama about the Napoleonic era.
The sister's tales (and their later effects and side-effects) are used in order to mock or question concepts such as heroism, enterprise, manliness, colonial discovery and so on. They also serve to mock or question some of the clichés found in adventure movies, for instance about warfare or wartime derring-do. For instance, there is a rather good joke about the cavalry arriving just in the nick of time, which, of course, is a Cliché with a capital C. Remove this specific element from the history of cinema, and hundreds of Westerns will collapse... (If I remember my "Lucky Luke" comics correctly, there's an equally successful joke about the cavalry arriving - and discovering, with stunned disappointment, that it has NOT saved the day.)
Unsurprisingly, "Le retour" also lampoons the writing of war memoirs.
Well worth a watch - but beware, this is a comedy for adults, not for the whole family.
A very funny comedy with enchanting lead performances and an inventive screenplay filled with twists and turns. (I had been fearing some pseudo-Jane Austen cr*p, but thankfully this was not the case.) The beautiful costumes and locations add greatly to the visual charm of the movie. Indeed, they are so good that they might feature in a "straight" history movie or historical drama about the Napoleonic era.
The sister's tales (and their later effects and side-effects) are used in order to mock or question concepts such as heroism, enterprise, manliness, colonial discovery and so on. They also serve to mock or question some of the clichés found in adventure movies, for instance about warfare or wartime derring-do. For instance, there is a rather good joke about the cavalry arriving just in the nick of time, which, of course, is a Cliché with a capital C. Remove this specific element from the history of cinema, and hundreds of Westerns will collapse... (If I remember my "Lucky Luke" comics correctly, there's an equally successful joke about the cavalry arriving - and discovering, with stunned disappointment, that it has NOT saved the day.)
Unsurprisingly, "Le retour" also lampoons the writing of war memoirs.
Well worth a watch - but beware, this is a comedy for adults, not for the whole family.