QUAND LA RÉALITÉ DÉPASSE LA FICTION
Docu-Marrant. Un Hommage À Notre Plus Grand Acteur Français.
[WHEN REALITY OVERTAKES FICTION
Docu-Comedy. An Hommage To Our Greatest French Actor.]

It's a laugh-a-minute in France. And for the past forty-odd years here is the joke.

CHIRAC BECOMES A FIGURE OF FUN - BY BEING HIMSELF
Satire Uses Archive TV Clips From 40-Year Career
'No Violence But Plenty Of Corpses,' Say Creators

PARIS May 13, 2006 (Guardian) - Dans la Peau de Jacques Chirac - Being Jacques Chirac - played to tears of laughter at Paris previews this week. It will open in France on May 31 as part of a phenomenon the newspaper Liberation calls "Chiracophobia: the new national sport".

The 90-minute film is made up entirely of clips from archive television footage of Mr Chirac during nearly 40 years in public office, as minister, prime minister, Paris mayor and president. The footage gives free reign to his perpetual suave grin, vanity and famous political dithering and U-turning which saw him named the "weathervane" [La Girouette].

We see Mr Chirac wandering his country estate, his love of shaking hands - even with dogs, his chauffeur relaying how he would come out of 15-minute appointments with his trousers undone; and we see the frostiness from his long-suffering and fearsome wife Bernadette. An alarmingly convincing voiceover by a Chirac impersonator gives a hilarious commentary on the president's life.

French TV channels [Fr 2, 3, 4, 5, and RFO managed by France Télévisions, a holding company created by the state and with government representation throughout the organization] stayed well away and did not buy it.

The film's producers are the same French team that created March of the Penguins, which won this year's Oscar for best documentary and became the second most successful documentary in US box office history after Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11. Being Jacques Chirac is already being compared to a Michael Moore-style treatment. But its writer-director team, the satirists Karl Zero and Michel Royer, disagree. "Moore's film about George Bush came out at the time of the US 2004 election campaign, it was a piece of propaganda against his re-election," Zero said. "We know Chirac doesn't aspire to a third term as president ... this is not a propaganda film anti-, or pro-, Chirac."

Obviously, Messrs. Zero et Royer will never be invited as jurists at Cannes.

"Chirac as a true cinematic hero," added the producer, Bonne Pioche. "This is a very human comedy, with all the contradictions we recognise in ourselves. It's about a politician who we elected and who we therefore have the right to laugh at."

At last, France has her very own Jerry Lewis.

PFFT (What is this?): Laughable Jack 3 | Rayonnement français 0