Irreducible: the irresistible farce of Jérôme Commandeur (review)

With a great comic tempo, Jérôme Commandeur signs a very good comedy. Not to be missed tonight on M6.

Vincent Peltier (Jérôme Commandeur) is a very peaceful and very hidden civil servant of the Water and Forests department of Limoges. A guy who takes more than reason from his quiet little life and the advantages of his job “guaranteed for life”strictly refusing to leave his post. Even when a ministerial inspector (Pascale Arbillot), responsible for skimming the civil service, offers him a nice severance check. Then begins a war of nerves that will see Peltier transferred to the worst corners of France… and even to Greenland.

For his second film – he had co-directed the very forgettable My family already loves you! with Alan Corno -, Commandeur tackles the remake of the Italian hit QWhere are you going? and finds in this farce about civil service a playground where he can deploy all his comic obsessions. A successful bet, to (re)watch this evening on M6.

He uses humor that borders on the absurd (like this polar bear masturbation that gives rise to a romance) without ever losing sight of the humanity of his characters. A sort of improbable fusion between the cinema of Francis Veber and that of Alain Chabat, where the actor-director takes advantage of our very Gallic habits by confronting them with the customs of other countries.

Irreducible would perhaps have gained from being a bit more mean (surely the film’s biggest limitation) but Commandeur puts an incredible amount of energy into making his little universe work, populated with hilarious secondary roles (Valérie Lemercier, Gérard Darmon or Christian Clavier as an irascible unionist, a perfect counter-type).

Trailer :

Dany Boon and Jérôme Commandeur: a lasting friendship