Philippe de Broca has worked consistently since the 1960s, directing films for theatrical release and television. Yet when one thinks of de Broca, one thinks not of his recent titles but of his earliest and most successful films: sincere, playfully impudent comic spoofs made with dexterity and vigor, which stress illusion over reality. In these early films, which he also co-scripted, de Broca’s characters are nonconformists who celebrate life and the joy of personal liberation. Structurally the films are highly visual, more concerned with communicating by images than by any specifics in the scenario. And these images often are picturesque. De Broca acknowledges his desire to give pleasure to the esthetic sense and, as such, he is a popular artist. While these early films are neither as evocative as those of François Truffaut (with whom de Broca worked as an assistant director on The 400 Blows ) nor as cinematic as those of Claude Chabrol (with whom de Broca worked as an assistant director… read more
Philippe de Broca has worked consistently since the 1960s, directing films for theatrical release and television. Yet when one thinks of de Broca, one thinks not of his recent titles but of his earliest and most successful films: sincere, playfully impudent comic spoofs made with dexterity and vigor, which stress illusion over reality. In these early films, which he also co-scripted, de Broca’s characters are nonconformists who celebrate life and the joy of personal liberation. Structurally the films are highly visual, more concerned with communicating by images than by any specifics in the scenario. And these images often are picturesque. De Broca acknowledges his desire to give pleasure to the esthetic sense and, as such, he is a popular artist. While these early films are neither as evocative as those of François Truffaut (with whom de Broca worked as an assistant director on The 400 Blows ) nor as cinematic as those of Claude Chabrol (with whom de Broca worked as an assistant director on Le beau serge and Les cousins ), they exude style and wit. While they might be fanciful in content, their essence is emotionally genuine.
De Broca’s films are non-tragic, and feature humorous treatments of characters and their situations. One of his favorite themes is the relationship between the sexes, explored in his earliest films— Les Jeux de l’amour, Le Farceur , and L’Amant de cinq jours —each with Jean-Pierre Cassel playing a lighthearted lover. This character appears 20 years older in Le Cavaleur , featuring Jean Rochefort as a bored, self-centered womanizer. De Broca’s most popular early-career films, however, star Jean-Paul Belmondo: Cartouche , a flavorful comedy-swashbuckler chronicling the exploits of kind-hearted criminals in 18th-century Paris; and L’Homme de Rio , a charming James Bond spoof about a soldier on leave who is led to a stunningly photographed Brazil on a chase for treasure. His most renowned effort is Le Roi de coeur , set during the final days of World War I in a town that has been abandoned by all except the residents of an insane asylum. Thematically speaking, Le Roi de coeur is a perfect film for its time. Released just as the anti-Vietnam war movement was gaining momentum, it is a pungent satire that lampoons the very nature of war and conflict. Not surprisingly, Le Roi de coeur fast became a cult favorite among college students. It ran for six-and-a-half years alone at a Cambridge, Massachusetts, moviehouse. Le Roi de coeur is de Broca’s idea of an anti-war film. Typically, he does not focus on the calamity of a youthful hero who is robbed of his life (as in All Quiet on the Western Front ), or soldiers needlessly and maddeningly put to death by a military bureaucracy (as in Paths of Glory and Breaker Morant ), or the bloody slaughter of his protagonists. Deaths and tragedies in a de Broca film usually are obscured by humorous, feel-good situations. In Le Roi de coeur he gently, satirically celebrates individual freedom. His inmates appear saner than the warring society that has labeled them mad.
De Broca is more concerned with good than evil. He began his career as a newsreel cameraman in Algeria and made several documentary shorts, but switched to narrative filmmaking because he “decided the real world was just too ugly.” At his best, de Broca deals with possibilities—for peace, beauty, hope, love. Nevertheless, the work in his first half-decade as a feature filmmaker generally is more satisfying than his efforts of the past three decades. Among de Broca’s higher-profile post-1960s films are Le Cavaleur and Tendre Poulet ( Dear Inspector and Dear Detective ), a romantic comedy about a female cop who rekindles a romance with an old lover while sniffing out a killer. The latter was so popular that it spawned an American made-for-TV movie and an inferior de Broca-directed sequel, On a vole la cuisse de Jupiter ( Jupiter’s Thigh ). By the 1990s, de Broca mostly was directing for French television. A typical credit was Le Jardin des plantes ( The Greenhouse ), a chronicle of the warm and protective relationship between a little girl and her grandfather in the waning days of World War II. Le Jardin des plantes is a thematic throwback to Le Roi de coeur in that it may be interpreted as a statement about the folly of war. It also reflects on the less-thanhonorable behavior of some Frenchmen and women under the German occupation. Yet despite its somber setting, Le Jardin des plantes is consistent with de Broca’s cinematic view in that it primarily is a candy-coated entertainment that exudes a sentimentality for a time and place that in reality was brutal and dangerous.
By far de Broca’s highest-profile late-career theatrical feature is Le Bossu ( On Guard ), which may be linked to Cartouche as a swashbuckler/ripped-bodice period piece. Le Bossu is set in the France of Louis XIV and charts the derring-do resulting from a faithful swordsman’s rescue of an infant princess from the grasp of her sinister relations. While entertaining and acclaimed—it won nine César Award nominations— Le Bossu is nothing more than a slick, by-thenumbers commercial vehicle. In the end, de Broca’s best films were those made in the 1960s.—Rob Edelman
