乌龙谋杀案

A de Funès comedy is almost always too hyperactive for its own good, JO, is a French adaptation of Alec and Myra Coppel’s 1958 wacky Broadway play “THE GAZEBO”, which also authored an eponymous Hollywood adaptation in 1959, directed by George Marshall and stars Glenn Ford and Debbie Reynolds.

In JO, de Funès plays comedy playwright Antoine Brisebard, who has been blackmailed for years by the titular Jo, a shady figure who has been asking Antoine for hush money for a secret concerning the latter’s actress wife Sylvie (Gensac). Facing financial ruins, Antoine hatches a plan to croak Jo once and for all, the foundation of the gazebo Sylvie just ordered for his birthday fits like a perfect locale to bury the body. But comedy of errors and a bird-dogging Inspector Ducros (Blier) prevent his plan from going swimmingly, Antoine even doesn’t know the identity of the man he accidentally shoots, before soon the film is debased to a monomaniac slapstick about “how to hide the stiff?”, Antoine and Sylvie’s concerted endeavor wears thin quickly, while the hustling and bustling supporting cast doesn’t help either (as the roughly manhandled maid, Christiane Muller’s forced laughter is squirm-inducing), this quasi-single-location farce eventually fizzles out with more cheap knockabouts than boffola laughter.

Everything within the Brisebard’s villa looks egregiously rickety (that goes without saying about the jerry-built gazebo), and Raymond Lefebvre’s Bondian score feels misaligned with the movie’s whirling speed, which is so exhaustingly insistent lest the comedic effect falls flat if the tempo is slowed down. De Funès arduously works himself into the ground, but he appears more like a reckless farceur than a comedian, Blier, on the contrary, tempers the hyperactivity with his own poised, resigned comedic rhythm that precludes the movie from heading into a tailspin, but that said, it is never the intention of the director Jean Girault and the star de Funès that JO would become anything more than a churned-out cash cow, for its artistic value, it is different strokes for different folks.

referential entries: Yves Robert’s THE TALL BLOND MAN WITH ONE BLACK SHOE (1972, 7.4/10);Mario Monicelli’s MY FRIENDS (1975, 7.6/10).