Bis (2015)

Dominique Farrugia's Bis opens with a premise that has powered a thousand comedies and will power a thousand more: two men in their forties, one a serial hedonist and one a domesticated father, get drunk, suffer an accident, and wake up in 1986 at the age of seventeen. The dream of a second chance is dangled, the mistakes of youth are catalogued, and the film proceeds with the tidy efficiency of a French mainstream comedy that knows exactly which buttons it intends to press. It is pleasant. It is competent. It is the cinematic equivalent of a lukewarm bath.

On the question of social consciousness, the film is a desert. The cast is a conventional ensemble of familiar French comic faces, assembled for laughs and name recognition, with no evident interest in representation as a project. Women appear as girlfriends, mothers, and objects of pursuit, and the screenplay never pauses to interrogate this arrangement. The return to 1986 is a personal nostalgia mechanism, not a revisionist reading of history, and the decade is deployed for its soundtrack and its haircuts. There is no engagement with climate, with capital, with bodies, with neurodivergence, or with race. Nobody lectures. Nobody has an agenda. The characters want to get rich, get laid, or repair a marriage, and the film is content to let them.

This is not a criticism, strictly speaking. A comedy can simply be a comedy, and there is a certain relief in encountering a film that has no interest in instructing its audience. But the sommelier's duty is to note what is in the glass, and this glass contains nothing but the house red. A score of zero across every marker is rare, and we record it without malice. The film is a time-travel farce from 2015 that could have been made in 1986, and in a sense, was.