Didier

Alain Chabat is a very popular French actor. This movie constitutes his first transition behind the camera. Far from being a perfect success, "Didier" remains a fair and honest comedy.

Alain Chabat adopted a correct making that contains interesting clever visuals and ringing brainwaves. It succeeds in compensating a rather slight screenplay. It's based on a convenient situation: this is the story of a man (Jean-Pierre Bacri) who's very embarrassed because he's got to cope with several problems, especially professional. One of his friend asks him to take care of his dog, "Didier". One morning, "Didier" has become a man... Moreover, some parts of the screenplay make it conventional, Didier will find out (unwittingly) the solution to solve his master's worries and predictable (imagine the feelings of people who see a man on the street who behaves like a dog).

At last, the movie loses of its lure when it comes to deal with football (Jean-Pierre Bacri plays the role of an unlucky trainer). Despite everything, some dialogs and several sequences are funny enough to burst into laughter. The result isn't great but it's nice. It's also a movie with an ounce of fantastic. One last thing: Alain Chabat had the good idea by not revealing the truth about Didier's transformation into a man.

Jean-Pierre Costa (Jean-Pierre Bacri) is a confused agent of soccer players. He is in charge of taking care of Didier, Annabelle's Labrador dog, for ten days. By mysterious reason, Didier is hit by a ray (or light) and becomes a man. The situations for this non-sense and crazy movie are so ridiculous that become funny in the end. Brazilian (like French) love soccer, and the situations in the soccer field are also funny. My vote is six.

Didier is an unusual film about a dog becoming a man, keeping his dog's mind.

It deals with a humorous tone with more serious things, and the fact that Alain Chabat wrote the script and is the main protagonist is a plus - but also shows the limits. A few nice, very funny moments, smart and hilarious lines "hey you treat him real bad. You talk to him like he's a dog".

Shot in Montpellier, Southern France, it's a pleasant film for an hour or so. It won't change your life but was never meant to. Kept a bit shorter, it would have been better even, the end is slow to come.

I first saw Didier when it came out - back in 1997. I was living in Brussels then and although my French was not very good yet, I enjoyed it _a lot_. I just saw it on video for the second time and I'm so glad I did because I could now fully appreciate the humour in Alain Chabat's dialogues (which unfortunately lose a bit of their sharpness when translated to other languages) and Jean-Pierre Bacri's performance. Bacri is a very good actor - very natural, very real and very charming. And Chabat is perfect as a ... human dog - even in small details as in the way he looks at Bacri when he scolds him about sniffing other people's ass or when he asks him whether he slept with his girlfriend. I do hope that Chabat will soon create another film as funny, original and "genial" as Didier. P.S. If you speak French, don't miss the credits at the end of the film and the small messages from Chabat here and there.

...as silly as it may sound (for those who know/have seen this film of course) it is true.

Around the time this film came out, I was living in France. It was on TV one night, and decided to record it for some inexplicable reason.

I cannot remember the way I felt the first time I saw it, but I know that it became my favourite film at the time(yes, I was very young back then...),and watched it over and over. In fact, I watched it so many times that I knew the order of the scenes, the dialogues word by word and the facial expressions as well. I remember I used to recite the whole film in my bed at night, when I couldn't sleep.

I loved the soundtrack, the characters (especially Didier, played by Alain Chabat, who is by the way a very famous actor in France) and everything about it. The funny thing is that at my age at the time, I didn't find the whole thing silly, since a kid wouldn't find 'Tom & Jerry' silly either, why would he find silly a story of a dog who one night changes into a man who behaves like a dog? In fact, I kind of considered it as a comedy, with serious dramatic elements.

Many people will probably find it stupid, but even today I find a certain charm about this film, and I do think that it's a very entertaining, funny little comedy. If you like the plot, you won't be disappointed, because as silly as it is, it's well executed, with very good jokes.

Check it out if you can, and enjoy!