Critics reviews

The triumph of the film is that it moves away somewhat from the silent-comedy influence without becoming more conventional. Etaix has found a new voice, which can speak of more rounded characters and more psychological problems, which can depend more on language, but which is still unique, playful, experimental, weaving his design, music, and pantomime skills and his gift for surrealism into a tender and convincing narrative.

Actor/director/dapper everyman Pierre Étaix's first color feature is a playful collection of formal gags, Surrealist tangents, sepia-toned parodies, and poker-faced slapstick bits—comic poetry.

The delightfully playful, playfully imaginative "Grand Amour" was directed by Pierre Etaix, a filmmaker, illustrator, musician and clown whose major work and poetic melancholia has long been denied to filmgoers.

Étaix satirizes the marmoreal chill of the bourgeoisie, the small-town gossip mill, and, above all, the absurd yet agonized, blundering yet callous delusions of desire. His humor is as exquisitely intricate as it is anarchically devastating.

The plot is the kind of malaise-of-the-middle-aged–married-man hokum that would make Tom Ewell cringe. But the surreal comic tangents that Étaix and longtime cowriter Jean-Claude Carrière deliver are pure sow's-ear silk, from a literalization of splitting joint possessions down the middle to an extended beds-as-cars sequence that predicts Michel Gondry's whimsical-absurdist aesthetic.