Zucker, Zucker!

Excellent comedy with great numbers of actors. It's quite rare to see a French comic film with a very solid satirical background.

This bittersweet comedy refers to a very real event: the speculative sugar bubble of 1974, when soaring prices created a real shortage in French stores and speculative madness. The bursting of this bubble has ruined many speculators and threatened to sink 3 French banks, before the state came to the rescue. It is this mechanism that is fiercely portrayed in the film, along with all the intricate cogs and schemes of commodity markets and of course the small arrangements between friends. The big fish always come out and it's the little ones who drink the cup at the end ... That's the moral of the story! The subprime mortgage crisis in 2008 proved, if necessary, that this is still true today. Depardieu and Carmet have crossed paths in other films before, but this is the first time that a film has been built on this powerful and sympathetic tandem. An unfailing friendship will be born between them after this film. A great selection of actors completes this legendary duo: Michel Piccoli, Georges Descrières, Marthe Villalonga, Roger Hanin, Claude Piéplu... For those who love French cinema of the 70s, these names awaken the nostalgia of blessed times. This film is not the best known in Gérard Depardieu's filmography, but it really deserves to be discovered and if possible in its original version with subtitles.

The best movie I can remember with Depardieu.

The plot is really good: talking about how one influent person can make the curves of the sugar rocket up artificially on the stock market whereas on the other side of the power a dumb ass losses all his money when the market crash down after somebody advised him to invest on sugar.

The two main characters are excellent. It might look a bit overacted sometimes. But it is lovely to see them doing it like that.

I would compare it to other financial movies like "Boillers room", "Wall street" and a book that I really like from Zola: "l'argent" (the money). But it has a ironic french touch in the dialogs that the two American movies don't have.