Le fakir du Grand Hôtel: A messy, charming relic

Is this for you?

If you like old-school French farce where half the cast is constantly hiding behind curtains, you'll probably have a decent time. If you need your movies to have, you know, logic or a coherent plot, stay far away from this one. It's the kind of film that feels like a theater play that just happened to have a camera pointed at it for an hour and a half. 🏨

Armand Bernard is clearly working overtime here. He has this frantic energy that keeps the whole thing from totally sinking into the floorboards.

The Hotel Chaos

The whole premise of the 'fakir' thing is obviously nonsense. It’s just an excuse for characters to act like idiots while wearing turbans. There is a specific scene where he’s trying to keep up the ruse during dinner, and he just stares into the middle distance like he’s trying to remember if he left the stove on at home. It’s genuinely funny in a way that feels completely accidental.

I found myself comparing the pacing to something like Brewster's Millions, though this one has way less money and way more shouting. The doors in that hotel must have been slammed a thousand times. I started counting after the third reel and lost track pretty quick.

It’s not as polished as some of the other stuff from that era, like Pauline, but it has this weird, frantic heartbeat. It doesn't try to be profound. It just wants to get to the next punchline, even when the punchline is just someone tripping over a rug.

• The sound quality is... well, it's 1930s audio. Don't turn your volume up too high.
• The supporting cast looks bored in about 40% of the shots.
• The 'magic' tricks are just cheap stagecraft, which is honestly the best part.

Is it a masterpiece? Absolutely not. But I’d take this over some of the super serious dramas I’ve seen recently. At least nobody is sitting around giving a ten-minute monologue about their childhood trauma. They’re just trying to be a fakir and failing miserably. That's good enough for me. 🤷‍♂️