We Will All Meet in Paradise

Four friends in their forties, back at the same table in the middle of their lives. Etienne has separated from his wife and lives with his daughter; Bouly is out of work, Simon is dealing with the lies of his married life, and Daniel tries to solve everybody's problems. The idea of buying a country house brings them together again. The film is not interested in a midlife crisis. It is interested in how a friendship between men is maintained: these men never say anything to each other directly, joke continuously, and are honest only in moments of disaster. The form is episodic comedy: short scenes, fast dialogue, and sad pauses in between. This is the sequel to Yves Robert's Un éléphant ça trompe énormément from 1976, and the same four actors returned: Jean Rochefort, Claude Brasseur, Guy Bedos and Victor Lanoux. The two films together are regarded as the best-known portrait of the French bourgeois male of the seventies. Who it is for: viewers who like French friendship comedies and the cinema of the seventies. Who it is not for: anyone who does not know the first film. The characters' histories are not explained, and the women exist largely in terms of the men's problems.