On peut toujours rêver

Charles de Boylesve, a rich aristocrat nicknamed the "emperor" despite an enviable situation is deeply bored in his life and is feared by his family and associates. His sole pleasure is to steal items in supermarkets. One day, during one of his thefts, he makes the acquaintance of a young, immigrated hairdresser called Rachid. Between the two of them, a surprising friendship settles down and is the opportunity for Cahles to escape himself from his sultry background.

Of course, I won't tell the story in detail but it's a well-known pattern that's been countlessly used in the history of cinema that Pierre Richard has recourse to and as a filmmaker: the clash between two worlds and at the same time, the strong bond that links two men. In 2011, a French comedy entilted Intouchables with Omar Sy and François Cluzet broke high at the French box-office, depicting the complicity between a high upper-class man and a ruffian in the shoes of a false male nurse. Comical sequences were created from a shift between their respective ways of living. 20 years earlier, On Peut Toujours Rêver shelters very similar elements but it didn't do very well from a commercial standpoint and that's a shame for this Pierre Richard effort is earmarked from a real author and it would be unwelcome to disown it.

In the seventies, Pierre Richard created a very special kind of neptunian character that secured his popularity: a very distracted man who seemed to come from another planet and who was unware of the events surrounding him. Just remember le Distrait (1970) or le Grand Blond avec une Chaussure Noire (1972) in which his comical skills worked wonders. With On Peut Toujours Rêver, the actor takes back his peculiar recipe with irresistible effects. Comic visual distances, eccentric camera angles and somewhat frozen postures from actors all walk hand in hand in a convincing way and the whole thing is wrapped with a certain tenderness and daydream. Hence the title of the film that is readable on several levels. And perhaps that's why this piece of work was quite rejected when it was shown in the cinemas. In the seventies, the aforementionned comic processes epitomized the persona of Pierre Richard and constituted his zeitgeist but twenty years later, cinematographic trends had moved again and Pierre Richard's kind of atypical character found himself out of place and out of time. I personally wonder if the title contains an ironic connotation from the author both with the story and his current artistic situation at the dawn of the nineties.

Nevertheless, On Peut Toujours Rêver is a delight to watch and it is several notches above hundred of French comedies where vulgarity has free recourse as a comical supply. In 1991, times changed but not Pierre Richard and it was better that way. Alas! Not for very long because six years later, he signed a disappointing epitaph called Droit Dans le Mur (1997) whose title bore weight. And thus, he lost the favors of public. Definitely? Maybe not because in parallel, his absence in French landscape cinema only made him warmer in the hearts of many French viewers.