VALERIE LEMERCIER, DENIS PODALYDÈS, AND NOÉMIE LVOVSKY IN GRANNY'S FUNERAL

Funeral humor, French style

The protagonist of this comedy, Armand (Denis Podalydès), is getting divorced from his wife Helene (Isabelle Candelier), with whom he co-runs a pharmacy, and now spends his free time with his girlfriend Alix (comic Valerie Lemercier), a loud, foul-mouthed divorce, and has a cliché teenage son, Vincent (Benoît Hamon) who spends all his time on video games. The action begins when Armand gets a phone call about his paternal grandmother's death and learns that since his father is in the nuthouse, he's in charge of arranging the obsequies, even though he barely knew the lady, in fact had forgotten she existed. Score one for the artificiality of blood ties in the modern world.

Uneaven tone and a reliance on wordplay that's funnier in French than in English subtitles make Podalydes' Granny's Funeral (Adieu Berthe ou l'enterrement de mémé in the complete French title) a tough sell for American audiences. No one here has international star quality. This movie's cloying level of triviality would make one wonder why it's done so well with Gallic audiencs and critics -- except that the Podalydès brothers, Bruno, who directs and has a role as an over-relaxed funeral director and Denis, who cowrote and stars, are very popular in the home country. Those who get only the visuals will see some humor and satire in the fancier funeral home's choices of oddly-shaped coffins. There's some byplay involving magic -- Armand used to want to be a professional magician. Otherwise, blah blah blah.

The humor here is verbal more than physical, and lazy, not elaborate. It relies mainly on meandering scenes involving only two to four people. There is nothing like the sense of structure, buildup, and high absurdity we get in the British Death at a Funeral or its cruder but still very funny American remake. A slight complication comes through the need to choose between two undertakers, the high-tech one with weirdly shaped coffins run by Rovier-Boubet (Michel Vuillermoz), who's connected to Helene's mother (Catherine Hiegel), and the more laidback Gronda (Bruno Podalydès), who has built up his income by specializing in pet funerals: mice are a gold mine, because they live less than a year. Sparrows and lobsters live a really long time. I didn't know that. But I didn't need to see this movie to find out.

Whether or not you find all this charming, the humor fades away pretty much once Armand and Alix have visited the undertakers and are spending a night at the retirement home where the old lady died. At this point the Podalydès brothers (both collaborated on the writing) settle down and try to say something more serious about old age and death.

Adieu Berthe, 100min., debuted at Cannes May 2012 and had a French theatrical release in June (Allociné 3.9, based on 26 reviews). It is evident from Amélie Dubois's review in the media-hip weekly Les Inrockuptibles that the French appreciated the vivid, nonstop wordplay combined with what they saw as great generosity toward all the characters and humanity and forgiveness in the treatment of the subject matter. The French find this movie "really funny and madly sad," to quote from another review, but the non-French-speaker might not perceive either quality with the same vividness. Clearly one of the most successful French film comedies of the year, but Americans would greatly prefer the in all ways more successful Camille Rewinds of Noémie Lvovsky (Lvovsky has a brief cameo here). An American would even prefer the corny but more successful Isabelle Huppert vehicle, My Worst Nightmare (where Bruno appears, as Denis appears in Camille): the French film world is small and the French comedy film world is even smaller).

Screened for this review as a part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center in collaboration with UniFrance, which runs Feb. 28-Mar. 10, 2013.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.