Madcap on the Loose: Philippe de Broca’s Cartouche and Le Magnifique

Across Cartouche and Le Magnifique, Philippe de Broca truly manages to have his cake and eat it too.

Cartouche

After starting his career as an assistant director to French New Wave titans François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, Philippe de Broca began to dabble in more mainstream filmmaking, primarily directing broad, farcical comedies. Despite being more bound by the restrictions of studios than many of the internationally renowned French directors of the 1960s, de Broca was equally influenced and inspired by overlooked Hollywood fare, particularly sex comedies and spy films, and forged a madcap style all his own.

In 1962, de Broca stepped into the sandbox of the swashbuckling adventure film, telling the tale of Louis Dominique Garthausen, a.k.a. Cartouche, the famed 18th-century thief who, like Robin Hood, stole from the rich to give to the poor. Cartouche is charming for the boundless charisma of its star, Jean-Paul Belmondo—appearing in his first of six collaborations with de Broca—and his palpable chemistry with co-star Claudia Cardinale. But also noteworthy is de Broca’s lightness of touch, the swiftness with which he moves from one action set piece to the next in a way that mirrors the gracefulness of his suave, populist hero.

Though Cartouche’s parade of daring robberies—typically involving various French royals being thwarted and mocked—grows a bit wearisome after a while, de Broca caps the film with a fairly daring tonal shift that pierces the film’s otherwise jovial, rollicking atmosphere. Where violence and torture are presented primarily in the form of slapstick in the first 90 minutes, this climactic stretch is notably more dire in its depictions of brutality, which are completely untempered by humor. A lengthy waterboarding scene is as unsettling as the one in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat, while the once invincible Cartouche experiences increasingly cruel consequences as he succumbs to the relentless reach of state political power.

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A similarly jarring shift occurs 20 minutes into de Broca’s Le Magnifique, when the ridiculously over-the-top James Bond riff that opens the 1973 film is suddenly revealed to be a story that’s being written by a nebbish author of trashy pulp novels, François Merlin (Belmondo). Here, the shift is tonal, but also results in a distinct narrative rupture that creates dual (and dueling) realities that the film switches between—one in which François hopelessly pines for his upstairs neighbor, Christine (Jacqueline Bisset), and the other in which Belmondo portrays the novel’s protagonist, the dashing, infallible Bob St. Clar, and Bisset the gorgeous Tatiana, whom Bob sweeps off her feet while dispatching villains with relative ease.

Le Magnifique is sharp and raucous as a pure farce, clearly setting the stage for the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker films of the 1980s (especially Top Secret!) with its rapid-fire gags that playfully poke fun at the gratuitous violence and hyper-masculinity of the spy genre. However, it’s the cleverly devised structure and the skill with which de Broca and editor Henri Lanoë bounce between the “real” world of François and Christine and that of the novel that François is writing that helps Le Magnifique to rise above the level of pure parody.

The film makes clear that Bob St. Clar is the unfettered id of his creator, yet this notion is constantly undercut and toyed with through an arsenal of meta touches that see the author repeatedly reshaping his story as he vacillates between flirting and fighting with Christine. Adding another layer to this postmodern mélange of cartoonish tropes and conventions, Christine is also a sociology student studying masculinity in genre literature. And her influence on François, both in terms of sexual desire and through literary and feminist theory, further seeps into the events of the man’s novel as they’re intercut throughout the film.

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François’s personal and artistic struggle allows Le Magnifique to walk the thin line between reveling in the “blood, guts, and violence” inherent in the author’s chosen genre and actively critiquing it. It’s a tricky balancing act to pull off, and while de Broca pokes fun at the sheer absurdity of such testosterone-driven fiction, he never denies us the pure surface pleasures of his gloriously trashy pastiche, truly managing to have his cake and eat it too.

Cartouche and Le Magnifique are now available on Kino Lorber Blu-ray.

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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