Comédie-Française (2026)
There is a lovely idea buried inside Comédie-Française, and every so often the film brushes up against it. The Comédie-Française is the oldest still-performing theatre company in the world, an institution with three and a half centuries of history and one iron rule: the show is never cancelled. Take that rule, wind a clock down towards curtain-up, and pile on every disaster a first night can throw at a producer, and you have the makings of a proper farce. The trouble is that Bertrand Usclat and Martin Darondeau's film, which reaches UK and Irish cinemas in October, keeps forgetting it is meant to be funny.
Our way in is Nina, played by Pauline Clément, a producer steering a new retelling of Macbeth towards its opening night. Anyone who knows theatre will already be smiling at the choice, since Macbeth is the play actors will not even name aloud for fear of the curse, and Nina's evening plays out like a case study in why. Her lead actor is stuck on a stranded train and may not make it at all. Backstage, half the company seems to be quietly cheating on the other half, usually with a younger co-star. The equipment is failing piece by piece. And then, in the film's neatest bit of chaos, her ex arrives and deposits their baby squarely in her lap, because of course he does, three hours before the most important night of her career.
As a pressure cooker, it works well enough. The countdown to curtain is the film's smartest structural choice, and it does generate a real, low-level suspense as the minutes tick away and the problems multiply. You do find yourself wanting to know whether the show goes on, and that ticking clock carries you through the seventy-five minutes more than any single scene does. There is a decent little engine of tension here, even if the film never quite converts it into anything higher.
The hook that the marketing leans on is that the cast are, by and large, real members of the Comédie-Française company playing versions of that world, and it does lend the whole thing a spoofy, insider texture, a sense that these people know exactly the egos and superstitions and last-minute panics they are sending up. Clément is a steady, sympathetic centre, harried and holding it together, and the ensemble around her move with the easy familiarity of people who genuinely share a stage. On that level, as a portrait of a particular institution laughing at itself, it has a certain charm.
Here is my problem, though, and it is a big one for a film that bills itself as a comedy. I did not laugh. Not once. The ingredients of farce are all present and correct, the mounting disasters, the slamming-door timing, the indignity of a baby at the worst possible moment, but the film never finds the escalating, delirious rhythm that makes farce actually land. Everything is pitched at a mild, faintly amused register, when what the material is begging for is either sharper wit or bigger, more reckless slapstick. It is the difference between a script that understands why something is funny and one that simply assumes the situation will do the work for it.
What you are left with, then, is not really a comedy at all but a mild backstage drama with comic trappings, a dramedy that leans far more on the drama than the promised laughs. Taken on those terms it is perfectly watchable. I was never bored, exactly, and the behind-the-scenes glimpse of a storied institution has its own quiet interest. But watchable is a long way from the "comedy of the summer" the posters promised, and there is a real gap between what this film is being sold as and what it actually delivers.
Three stars, and I suspect that is me being generous on the strength of the structure and the setting rather than anything the comedy earns. Comédie-Française is a competent, mildly diverting evening with a great idea and a great venue that it never fully exploits. If you go in expecting a sharp French farce you will come out puzzled, but if you approach it as a gentle, ticking-clock drama about the madness of putting on a show, there is a modest pleasure to be had. I just wish it had trusted its own premise enough to actually make me laugh.
Comédie-Française is in UK and Irish cinemas from 9 October. Reviewed from a screener provided by the film's UK press team.
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