L'école des contribuables: A Taxing Mess

Is it worth your time?

Honestly, only if you have a massive soft spot for French theater-style comedies from the 30s. If you hate movies where people just stand in fancy rooms and yell about money for an hour, steer clear. It’s definitely not for anyone looking for a brisk pace.

L'école des contribuables feels like a play that accidentally wandered onto a film set. The dialogue is snappy, but it's constant. Sometimes I wanted someone to just stop talking for five seconds so I could look at the curtains.

Oddly Specific Notes

• The tax office scenes look so sterile it’s almost funny.
• I swear the same background prop appears in three different rooms. Maybe they were on a budget?
• The way characters enter a room is always so dramatic. Like they’re announcing their own arrival.

There’s a specific bit where someone is holding a stack of papers and they just keep waving them around. It becomes the most distracting thing in the frame. I stopped listening to the plot entirely just to see if they’d drop them. They didn't.

It reminds me a bit of the chaotic energy in Plastered in Paris, though without the same level of physical slapstick. This one is more about the verbal sparring. It’s clever, sure, but it wears you down.

The performances are... loud. Very loud. Pierre Larquey is doing a lot of work here, trying to hold the whole thing together while everyone else is running in circles. It’s the kind of acting that feels like it needs to reach the back row of a balcony, even though it’s being captured by a camera lens.

Is it a masterpiece? No. Is it charming in a dusty, old-school way? Maybe. I think I liked it more when it stopped trying to be a clever commentary on taxes and just let the characters be idiots for a minute. 💼💸