La belle affaire (1973) Poster

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6/10
French connection 3
ulicknormanowen14 December 2020
Paul and Thérèse are not lucky with their cafés :their latest is not far from an airport ,and every time a plane tales off or lands, the bottles ,the glasses, the tables, everything, shake.Despondent ,they leave for Marseille where a good deal awaits ; "Aux bons enfants" (=the good children's) is a nice place whose customers include a police captain (Michel Galabru).

But this is a façade :they discover that a passage in their basement leads to a brothel whose madam is Max (Ginette Leclerc ,the bad gal of the forties ); worse, drug-traffickers use their café as a hub to bring and pick up cocaine (in boxes of calissons =lozenge shaped sweets made of ground almonds,made in the south of France).But the neighbors have worse to tell them: the café is often sold by a widow.Paul , supported by wife, decides to strike back.

Michel Serrault and Rosy Varte -who had played Molière's "le bourgeois gentilhomme " together some years back - have a strong presence ,and in spite of the spate of misfortunes which keep falling on them , show stamina and resilience .

The movie loses steam in its last third ,with the predictable free-for-all ,but the date of the settlement of scores is a smart choice.
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7/10
Black comedy with an impressive body count
myriamlenys27 March 2023
Warning: Spoilers
Having been forced through misfortune to give up their pub, a husband and wife move to Marseilles in order to begin a new chapter in their lives. In Marseilles their new pub does very well, drawing a large and friendly crowd. Sinking ever deeper into the welcoming embrace of the neighborhood, the pub owners do not realize they're becoming cogs in a professional drugs smuggling operation...

"La belle affaire" is a funny, lively black comedy about two unsuspecting people who happen upon a web of vice and crime. A bit more polish with regard to both dialogue and screenplay might have lifted the work up to golden classic status. Michel Serrault and Rosy Varte, who show a great chemistry, do very well as the besieged pub owners.

The movie pokes fun both at organized crime and at straight gangster movies, for instance by creating two brother characters, les frères Nahum, who have become specialized in the discreet removal of corpses. (The brothers have grown so blasé about their trade that they hand out actual business cards.) Other targets include a variety of subjects such as the "Concorde" airplane, which, in terms of noise pollution, was infamous for making an awful racket.

I laughed merrily but I'm not sure that people confronted with the damages caused by drugs-related gangsterism would do the same. Still, the city where I live - Mechelen, in the north of Belgium - gets exposed to ever more serious crime, partially by way of side-effect of the illegal drugs trade flowing through nearby Antwerp. We seem to be marching towards a situation where rival gangs will wage open warfare in broad daylight. In other words, Marseilles is no longer all that distant...

Sadly the image quality of "La belle affaire" has much deteriorated. Do try to find some version with sharper images - if it still exists.
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