Pardon Mon Affaire

Etienne is in his forties, married, a civil servant at the ministry, with no complaints about his life. In a car park he sees a woman in a red dress; her skirt lifts as she walks over a grate, and from that day he cannot think straight. Every step he takes to find her puts him in a more ridiculous position. The subject is not adultery but the absurdity of the story a man of forty tells himself. Etienne's three friends are in comparable crises, and when the four are together the film shifts its weight from comedy to friendship. The form is French farce at its most skilled: situation comedy, perfectly timed falls, and single disasters built up over long stretches, like the balcony sequence. Yves Robert never strains the camera; everything runs on performance. The original title, Un éléphant ça trompe énormément, rests on a French pun and does not translate. It was such a hit that a sequel with the same cast followed the next year. In America it was remade in 1984 by Gene Wilder as The Woman in Red. Jean Rochefort leads, with Claude Brasseur, Guy Bedos and Victor Lanoux as the friends. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies French comedy and Rochefort. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by a woman written purely as an object of desire; on that count the film belongs to its period.