L'homme à l'Hispano (1933) review: The ultimate 'fake it till you make it' disaster

If you have seventy minutes to spare and love watching people make the absolute worst financial decisions of their lives, this is worth a look. People who dig old-school French melodrama and shiny vintage cars will probably have a good time here. But if you can't stand scratchy 1930s audio and characters who refuse to just tell the truth, you will definitely want to throw your remote at the screen. 🚗

So, the setup is pretty wild. Gaston is completely broke, but his friends decide the best gift to give him is a massive, incredibly expensive Hispano-Suiza luxury car.

Like, why not just give him some cash? He literally has nothing, but now he has to drive around looking like a billionaire.

He rolls into Biarritz and immediately starts pretending he is loaded to impress Lady Stéphane. She falls for it, obviously, because the car is basically a mansion on wheels.

I kept thinking about how much easier his life would be if he just sold the tires. He pretends to be this high society genius, though he is about as qualified as the main guy in The Expert.

The actress playing Stéphane, Marie Bell, has this incredibly dramatic way of looking at him. She stares at him like she wants to eat him, or maybe just buy his car.

There is this one scene where they are sitting by the beach and the wind is blowing so hard you can barely hear what they are saying over the microphone hiss. It feels very real, almost like the crew just gave up on fixing the sound that day.

And then she starts spending his money. Not just his pocket change, but the actual emergency cash he saved up to restart his life in Senegal.

Why Senegal? The movie never really explains why that is his big dream, but he talks about it like it is the promised land.

Compared to the silly money struggles in shorts like Below Zero, this is pure, heavy tragedy. You can just feel the impending doom coming from a mile away.

Director Jean Epstein is famous for doing crazy, trippy camera tricks, but he keeps things mostly normal here. Except for the car shots, which are filmed like they are in a commercial.

Seriously, the camera loves that Hispano-Suiza more than any of the human actors. There is a close-up of the radiator cap that lasts so long it gets kind of funny.

By the end, you just want to shake Gaston and tell him to get a regular job. It is a frustrating watch, but in a way that keeps you glued to the screen to see how bad it gets. 📉