La Chèvre

Marie, the daughter of a company chairman, disappears in Mexico while on holiday. She is chronically unlucky in a way everyone around her knows: every bad possibility happens to her. The company psychologist proposes a strange solution: send someone equally unlucky to find her, since he will fall into the same traps and so follow her trail. The man chosen is an accountant, Francois Perrin. A hard-nosed private detective, Campana, goes with him. Francis Veber wrote and directed. Pierre Richard plays Perrin and Gerard Depardieu plays Campana. It opened on 9 December 1981. It was the first film the two made together and is taken as the start of the buddy comedy in eighties French cinema. Richard and Depardieu went on to make two more with Veber. It sold more than seven million tickets in France and was the most-seen French film of 1981. The screenplay is still cited as a model, because the entire comedy comes out of a single rule and the film never once breaks that rule after establishing it. Who it is for: viewers who like classic French comedy and road films built on two opposite characters. Who it is not for: anyone who will question how Mexico is drawn. The film uses the country purely as scenery.