Alain Chabat and the eternal incomprehension around RRRrrrr!!!

Flanked by critics upon its release in 2004, the prehistoric comedy has long been considered the failure of Alain Chabat and Robin Hood. Twenty years later, while it has become cult and will return again this evening on TFX, there is still incomprehension…

“It’s going to be completely dark…“You know the rest.

Just after the enormous success of Didier (1997) andAsterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (2002), Alain Chabat signs his third feature film with RRRrrrr!!! A prehistoric farce that was very poorly received by the press upon its release. And despite 1.7 million admissions at the French box office, the film has long retained the image of a failed comedy… before becoming, over the years, a true cult film thanks to its (very) numerous flashes of genius.

The joke imagined by the troupe of Robin Hood – Pierre-François Martin-Laval, Marina Foïs, Jean-Paul Rouve, Élise Larnicol, Maurice Barthélémy and Pascal Vincent – with the complicity of Alain Chabat, was to die of laughter, in sequences. But it was probably not sufficiently constructed to make it to the big screen. In any case, this is what a large part of the criticism of the time criticized.

A media violence from which Pierre-François Martin-Laval confided, with a certain seriousness, having had great difficulty recovering, last year, in A Sunday in the countryside on France 2:

“It wasn’t just Le Parisien who said it was rubbish. Everyone said it. It’s a huge slap in the face. Because we put so much passion, laughter and so much work… We wrote the script for more than two years, including ten to twelve months with Alain Chabat. We were very sad. It broke us a little too. I don’t even know if it didn’t separate us…“

The actor and director even reveals that he had a lot of trouble finding work afterwards: “It was a short crossing of the desert for almost two years…“The most difficult thing, according to him, was seeing his comrades from Robins continue their rise in the cinema while his career seemed to stop: “I called my agent and said, ‘But I had one of the leading roles. How come Jean-Paul Rouve and Marina Foïs continue to work after what happened, and I don’t?’ I felt like I was starting from scratch. I wondered if I could change careers.“

Same observation of incomprehension on the part of Alain Chabat, who explained last year in an interview with Brut that he was still won over by his film today: “I saw a little bit of RRRrrrr again!!! not long ago. There are things in RRRrrrr!!! which make me howl with laughter. And then I see that in the room, I’m the only one laughing… Clearly, I’m all alone on this.”

However, certain scenes have indeed entered the legend of French comedy. Chabat cites in particular the one where the tribal chief, played by Maurice Barthélémy, discusses with PEF, Marina Foïs and Élise Larnicol, who plays his wife: “At one point, the leader takes a stick and throws it. His wife goes looking for him like a dog. The timing of this thing makes me laugh a lot because everyone is super serious. It makes me howl with laughter. But I was watching this with several people… and I was the only one laughing at the time…“

Humor being undoubtedly the least shared thing in the world, Alain Chabat will wait almost ten years before directing a new feature film. He finally returned behind the camera in 2012 with On the Marsupilami trail.