François, an ordinary executive, leads a peaceful life, surrounded by his wife and children. One day, he discovers on the cover of a detective novel the portrait of his old accomplice Léo, whom he has not seen for 25 years and whom he once knew at summer holiday camp. The latter has become a movie stuntman but has remained an eternal teenager. Together, they decide to find Kuntchinski, the third thief of the gang, to start again the game they loved so much during their adolescence.
The movie was critically-acclaimed when it was released;today it's difficult to understand what the praise was all about ;some call it artistic ,I'll call it arty ;the screenplay is loose, and recalls the worst aspects of the Nouvelle Vague ,the actors left to their own devices : Yves Alfonso hams it up all along the way and he's almost unbearable ,beautiful talented Carole Bouquet plays here like a zombie and wonders what the hell she's doing in this business .
Nostalgia can be a wonderful subject,but it's not that much new :in George lampin's 1950 "les anciens de saint-Loup" where former students meet again in a school after all those years : in spite of an unpleasant macho side -which is also present in "double messieurs "-, the director already pointed out that memories do not matter that much when you grow up ; in his extraordinary epilogue of "la meilleure façon de marcher" (1976),Claude Miller put the holiday camp in parenthesis .
For highbrows.
