French Fried Vacation

A holiday club on the Ivory Coast. A newly arrived group of French tourists try to get through two weeks of activities run by the resort staff: dance classes, beach games, evening shows and an unbroken run of failed flirtations. Nobody is actually enjoying it and everybody is pretending to. Patrice Leconte directed. The theatre troupe Splendid wrote it and played it. The source is a play staged in March 1977, Amours, Coquillages et Crustacés, a parody of holiday clubs of the Club Méditerranée kind. The material was not invented: the Splendid company had actually worked three seasons as Club Med staff and took the behaviour they had watched there. Gilbert Trigano, who ran Club Med, refused to let them film at one of his villages because of the subject, so the production moved to a typical Ivorian village at Assouindé. The choice of director belonged to the troupe: Splendid picked Leconte because they had liked his earlier film. It did solid business on release with 2.2 million admissions, became a classic of French popular cinema in the years after and produced two sequels. Who it is for: viewers who like the ensemble comedies of seventies France and holiday parody. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a likeable character. Everybody here is insufferable on purpose and the comedy comes out of that discomfort.