Arlette et ses papas: A French farce with two dads too many

Is this worth your time?

If you like old-school French comedies where everyone talks fast and wears nice hats, you’ll probably have a good time. If you need your movies to have a tight script or anything resembling real-world logic, you’re going to be annoyed by the twenty-minute mark. It’s light, it’s fluffy, and it’s mostly just people running into rooms they shouldn’t be in.

Honestly, watching Arlette et ses papas felt like stumbling into a party where I didn't quite know the hosts. Jules Berry and Max Dearly are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. They play the two fathers with this frantic, high-energy style that feels like it belongs on a stage rather than a screen.

There’s a specific moment where they’re both trying to be the 'good dad' at the same time, and it just turns into a shouting match. It goes on for way longer than it needs to. It’s funny at first, then it gets weirdly loud, and then you just start staring at the wallpaper patterns in the background.

Speaking of the background, the sets are charmingly stage-y. You can almost see the wires holding the whole thing together. It lacks the slickness of something like Fedora, but it’s got a messy, human heart that I sort of appreciated.

• Renée Saint-Cyr has this way of looking at the camera that makes you think she knows the script is nonsense too.
• The dialogue is so fast that if you look away for a second, you’ve missed an entire plot twist.
• The lighting in the second act is surprisingly moody for a movie this silly.

I found myself thinking about The Love Egg while watching this, mostly because both films seem to think that confusion is the same thing as comedy. Sometimes it works! Sometimes you just want the characters to sit down and have a cup of tea so the plot can move on.

It’s not a masterpiece, and nobody is going to write a thesis on it. But there’s a sweet, weird energy here that’s hard to hate. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a slightly stale croissant—you know it’s not fresh, but you’re going to finish it anyway because you’re already holding it. 🥐

The ending lands with a thud, but by then, you’ve spent enough time with these people that you don’t really mind. It’s a slight movie, perfectly comfortable being just that.