Le coup de trois review: A chaotic, dusty French farce that time forgot

If you love old-school French comedies where everyone talks at the speed of light and doors slam every thirty seconds, you might actually enjoy Le coup de trois. But if you hate stagey, loud movies where the plot relies entirely on people not letting each other finish a sentence, please stay far away from this one. 🚪

I stumbled on this while looking for early sound comedies, and honestly, it feels like a play that someone captured on camera on a random Tuesday. The whole setup is incredibly simple, mostly revolving around a series of ridiculous misunderstandings that could be solved with a single honest conversation.

But of course, that would mean the movie ends in five minutes.

Instead, we get René Lefèvre looking constantly bewildered. His incredibly expressive face does most of the heavy lifting here, especially when the dialogue gets too frantic to follow.

He reminds me a lot of the frantic stage energy in The Giddy Age.

The Good, the Bad, and the Dusty

The print of the film I watched was pretty rough, which actually made the whole thing feel like some weird time capsule. You can hear the background hiss of the early sound equipment, and sometimes the actors walk too far from the mic, making them sound like they are shouting from a closet.

There is this one incredibly specific moment where Jeanne Fusier-Gir—who plays a classic, gossipy character—does a double-take that lasts so long I thought my screen had frozen. It is absolutely hilarious, though I am not entirely sure it was meant to be that funny. 😂

• The plot: A total mess of marriages, secrets, and fake identities.
• The acting: Extremely loud, very theatrical, and 100% un-subtle.
• The audio: Sounds like it was recorded inside a giant metal bucket.

It is definitely not a masterpiece like The Pursuit of Happiness from around the same era. It doesn't have that level of wit, choosing instead to just throw people into rooms and hope for the best.

Still, there is something very comforting about how cheap and earnest it feels. Nobody was trying to make art here; they were just trying to get a few cheap laughs from a weekend crowd in Paris. 🇫🇷

"If you are going to lie, at least make sure your accomplice is in the same room."

That quote basically sums up the entire second half of the movie. Everyone keeps telling different lies to the same three people, and the physical comedy gets incredibly goofy.

At one point, a character tries to hide behind a potted plant that is clearly way too small to hide a dog, let alone a grown man.

It goes on a bit too long, and the ending feels like they just ran out of film and decided to stop shooting. But if you want to see a bunch of dead French actors yelling at each other in dusty rooms, it is a fun way to waste an hour and a half.