Les deux canards: A noisy trip back to 1934

Is it worth your time?

Honestly, only if you have a massive soft spot for creaky, pre-war French slapstick. If you enjoy movies where people yell over each other for an hour while wearing very uncomfortable-looking suits, you'll be happy. If you prefer, say, the tighter pacing of The Lost Romance, you might want to skip this one entirely.

The whole thing moves like it's trying to win a race. It’s a stage play trapped in a movie camera, and you can practically hear the floorboards creaking.

Notes from the screen

• The dialogue is fast. Like, way too fast. I had to rewind twice just to make sure I wasn't missing a joke, though it turned out I wasn't.
• The guy playing the businessman, I swear he's about to pop a blood vessel in every single scene. It’s intense.
• There is a moment in the second act where a door slams so hard the whole frame shakes. Nobody in the movie acknowledges it. 🦆

The plot is about as deep as a puddle. A writer gets his play stolen—well, "borrowed"—by this loud-mouthed industrialist, and then everything goes to hell. It’s classic stuff, really. But man, the way they just keep piling on the misunderstandings feels exhausting after a while.

It’s definitely not as sharp as The Vixen. Sometimes you get the feeling the director just said, "Okay, stand there and look confused," and then walked away for a smoke.

There's this specific scene where they're all crowded around a table, waving their arms around. I got distracted by the wallpaper behind them. It’s this weird, busy pattern that just eats the actors whole. Why would you film a comedy against that? It’s distracting!

I guess if you want to see how they did things back in the early thirties, this is a time capsule. It’s got that specific, scratchy audio quality that feels like it’s coming from the bottom of a well. But it’s also just... very loud.

I spent half the runtime wondering if the actors were having fun or if they were just terrified of missing their cues. Some of the reactions feel like they're being broadcast to the back row of a massive theater, not a camera lens.

It’s not a masterpiece. It's not even particularly clever. It’s just a loud, dusty relic. Sometimes that's enough, I suppose.