There's a Matt Groening Life In Hell strip from the 1980s that articulates cinema's great paradox: the French are funny, sex is funny, comedies are funny, yet somehow no French sex comedies are funny. Bertrand Usclat and Martin Darondeau have made a film that cheerfully dismantles at least part of that equation. The premise is a pressure cooker: three hours before opening night of a Comédie Française Macbeth, and everything that can go wrong does. Director-turned-metteur-en-scène Nina (Pauline Clément) can't even get through the front door without her staff pass. What follows is a tightly wound sequence of disasters — superstitious actors, adulterous actors running lines mid-shag, Lady Macbeth stranded in Brest filming a TV series, a grande dame so stoned she's operating on a different plane entirely. The real pleasure here is the ensemble. Danièle Lebrun's stoned grande dame, Christian Hecq's stage manager who can explain in exhaustive technical detail why nothing can be fixed, Florence Viala's wardrobe mistress cataloguing her colleagues' physical imperfections — these are not plot functions, they're fully inhabited comic types. The film trusts them to land their moments, and they do. Usclat and Darondeau clearly know their Feydeau and their Veber. The comic architecture is classical farce: escalating complications, narrowing exits, a protagonist absorbing increasingly impossible obligations. Nina must not only direct Macbeth but, by the end, also perform the lead role while managing a toddler her ex-partner has deposited on her before curtain. The film wobbles when it reaches for something more. The working-motherhood subplot — Nina juggling career and childcare in real-time — is played as both comedy and genuine grievance, and it doesn't quite land as either. The critique is real but the film isn't committed enough to make it sting, and it isn't light enough to let it fly. A tighter edit would have trusted the machinery and cut the editorial. There's also a mild logic problem: a prestigious Comédie Française Macbeth with six or seven visible actors and a minister of culture incoming asks the audience to bracket quite a lot. The film mostly gets away with it through sheer energy and pace, but only if you don't think too hard. What saves it is exactly what the review promises: immaculate comic timing from a cast who understand the form. This is farce as a discipline, not a genre — every beat calibrated, every misunderstanding earned. It's not a film that will haunt you, but for 90-odd minutes it's very good fun, and that's exactly what it set out to be.
