William Goldman once wrote that the hardest kind of movies to do well were romantic comedies and action adventure films. Books upon books have been written about rom coms; the latter is less well explored. How many top class examples of the genre can you think of off the top of your head: Charade, North by Northwest, Romancing the Stone, the best Bonds, Raiders of the Lost Ark... there's not that many.
They're very easy to go wrong - the tone can be off, the wrong stars cast, the script too lazy. But when it works it works wonderfully as proved by this infectious fun French film. It has a high reputation - it was very popular internationally, it one of Jean Paul Belmondo's best remembered films - and I was delighted to see it lived up to the reputation.
The whole thing just works, from the moment the bright bossa nova theme song plays over the jaunty credits, to the opening sequence of a statue being stolen from a museum. This forms an effective Macguffin, with statue and professor being kidnapped along with professor's daughter (Francois Dorleac)... whose fiance (Belmondo) takes off in hot pursuit. There's a good ticking clock too in that Belmondo is on eight days leave from the army and has a certain time by which to get back.
Belmondo is the perfect hero, masculine, handsome (though not annoyingly pretty), clearly having the time of his life... much more likeable than say Alain Delon. Dorleac is a wonderful heroine, spiritied, beautiful and funny - a much sparkier performer than her sister, Catherine Deneuve.
It was shot on location in Paris and Brazil, the latter especially offering some fresh, gorgeous locations - even now Brazil doesn't turn up as a location that much in Hollywood films, so I'm not very familiar with it. They visit Rio and Brasilia and the Amazon it looks wonderful, beautifully shot. Brasilia has this wonderful other-world-y quality. The Amazon sequence at the end feels very Raiders of the Lost Arc-y. There's some unexpected poignancy at the end when we see an Amazon tribe by the roadside as a crew cut down trees.
If I'm being honest there's probably one sequence too many - Dorleac's final kidnapping was one too far. But it's just darn fun.
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