Reviewed by Tim Wong

SO this is the other side of French Cinema. Given my latest post-festival hangover included the in-your-face didacticism of Catherine Breillat and Bruno Dumont – we're talking experiments with genitalia and squeal-like-a-pig rednecks, respectively – it's no surprise that the totally non-threatening Ruby & Quentin played out like a much-needed aspirin and black coffee the morning after.


Recent attendees of another Euro-arthouse shocker, Irréversible, can vouch for this, because as much as you have to admire the bastion of French filmmaking in all its provocative, clinically-depressed glory, films like Anatomy of Hell and Twentynine Palms would destroy cinema as we know it if it wasn't for all those "other" movies to balance the shaky dialectic between art and entertainment. Think of it as a magnetic polar opposite in worldly terms, something to maintain the equilibrium of the movie universe, and more importantly provide the sort of lightweight, blissfully ignorant alternative to anything dense, offensive and downright cynical.

Fitting the bill, Francis Veber's latest film is as harmless as they come, and really does serve its own little purpose as neatly packaged, throwaway cinema. As the prototypical "French Farce" – where the schtick is very Basel Faulty-slash-Peter Sellers-slash-worse case scenario – the premise is as idiot-proof as the humour is effortless. Following the Hollywood-remade La Cage aux folles (1978), the particularly clever The Dinner Game (1998), and the overly silly The Closet (2001), Veber's latest comedic venture is more or less an extension of those three films, and while it doesn't so much as elaborate on the formula itself, it does suggest that this type of film has managed through consistency to fashion its own mini niche-genre within the (deteriorating) world of comedy film.

Ruby & Quentin is a "buddy" picture in every sense, and appears to be Veber's own reaction against the dull sexual dynamics of The Closet, which may or may not have been guilty of flirting with sellable "warm apple pie" trends, at the time. The flavour here is safer, with two middle-aged French stars in an odd couple role of strange nostalgic proportions. With everything so high-concept these days, the simple pairing of Jean Reno and Gérard Depardieu is almost fresh by multiplex standards, or at least quaint in its apparent novelty. Reno isn't really doing anything new as another silent-but-deadly sensitive hardass-type, so its mostly Depardieu in the idiot-hiding-Incredible-Hulk-like-powers-of-evasion role, that propels the film's chemistry and comedic thrust from beginning to end.

How Quentin (Depardieu) and Ruby (Reno) get to be so hand-in-hand consists of a failed robbery, imprisonment and ultimately, the sharing of a cell. Ruby's backstory is completely irrelevant in the shape of things, and is there simply to put him in jail with Quentin, and create the impetus for both characters to bond, break out and get chased around by bad guys for the rest of the film. Antics ensue with variable degrees of stupidity (from inadvertently sitting on terminally-ill patients, to the great escape via a cherry picker crane), culminating in an abrupt, nonchalant puff of an ending that spares us the sentimentality of a skyward-bound panning shot of the duo's theoretical "Two Friends" cafe – a discarding of the all-important "dream-motive" that most other film-endings would find impossible to resist.

It's a snappy resolution to a wisp of a film, and Veber knows best of all not to overstay his welcome. And given that it felt a lot like "drive-thru" filmmaking in its bite-sized, takeaway efficiency, it seems appropriate to compare it to fast food: fine in moderation, predictable-yet-satisfying and tasty for what it is. For those disillusioned by the fiery rhetoric of Michael Moore, irritated by the scat of American comedy, or still in recovery from the nausea of Irréversible, Ruby & Quentin is perhaps the perfect antidote to a rough night out at the cinema.