Philippe de Broca's Tendre poulet | Dear Detective (1978)

Dear Detective. Whatever genius invented that title couldn't possibly translate the pun in the title anyway. Admittedly, 'Tender Chicken' would hardly have been a suitable title for Annie Girardot (playing police chief Lise Tanquerelle at the age of about fifty-seven), but then there's a missed pun: 'poulet' is slang for cop. And Lise literally runs into Antoine Lemercier (Philippe Noiret), who's a teacher of Greek at the Sorbonne, as she's driving and he's riding a bicycle. And they turn out to be old friends when they were in class together, so there's a joining point.

And although they'd both love to cement that joining point in a relationship, Lise is held up by a series of apparently pointless murders, which is of course the MacGuffin: it keeps the attention and holds the suspense: this is not really about a series of murders but about will they/won't they get together? We really don't care why the presumably sexually depraved and psychotic concierge Charmille (Hubert Deschamps) killed those people.

In the end, of course Lise and Antoine get together, and there was even a sequel in 1980, when Lise and Antoine went on honeymoon in Greece: On a volé la cuisse de Jupiter (Jupiter's Thigh). Reviewers haven't been kind to the follow-up.

Philippe de Broca's La Gitane | The Gypsy (1986)

I'd not seen any of Philippe de Broca's films before, but this is quite simply a disaster. There are very few reviews of it but most of those admit that this is a very bad film for him. This was the eighties, so perhaps we can forget a comment to the effect that a temperamental computer must be female as it's indisposed once a month, but not the rest of this apparently characteristic blend of comedy and thriller.

Hubert (Claude Brasseur) is a banker divorced from Brigitte (Stéphane Audran) for ten years, although she still frequently contacts him, and she and his daughter Florence (Valérie Rojan) insist his lover Elsa (Clémentine Célarié) is a pute. His secretary Mlle Chaprot (Marie-Anne Chazel) also has eyes for him, although he calls her ugly because of her glasses and slight lack of make-up.

And then the explosion happens: the beautiful gypsy Mona (Valérie Kaprisky) steals his car, he reports it to the police and suddenly the not only beautiful but extremely intelligent, enterprising woman is part of his life, she visits his office, his home, robs the museum of some treasures, robs his bank, has him chase her all over the world, up the Tour Eiffel, they're in love, and that's as far as I'm going. Yes, a disaster, but there are a few moments of interest.

Could it be that the gypsy Ali Baba 'cave' of recycled wonders influenced Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Tire-Larigots in Micmacs?