Bye Bye Morons (2020)

Bye Bye Morons is a 2020 French comedy drama directed by Albert Dupontel, and it won six César Awards, including Best Film. The plot follows Suze, a hairdresser with a terminal illness, who searches for the child she was forced to abandon at fifteen. She teams with JB, a man in the middle of a burnout, and Serge, a blind archivist. The film treats Suze's coercion as a personal tragedy, not a feminist polemic. The cast is white French and Belgian, with no representation agenda. There are no LGBTQ themes, no racial consciousness, no climate concerns, no body positivity messaging, no neurodivergence advocacy, and no revisionist history. The cultural markers are thin on the ground.

The film's anger is aimed at bureaucratic cruelty, ageism, and police violence. It has an anti-authority streak, but no eat-the-rich framework. Its social critique arrives through farce and tragedy, not sermonizing. The ending, where Suze and JB embrace before armed police gun them down, is bleak and romantic in equal measure. The film is more misanthropic than progressive. It says goodbye to morons, not to capitalism. The feminist element is present but muted, a woman's quest for closure after a teenage pregnancy she did not choose. That is enough for a small score, not a manifesto.

As a sommelier of cultural vintages, I find this a low-scoring bottle. It has faint notes of feminist grievance and anti-bureaucratic rage, but no modern social justice bouquet. The Guardian called it a frantically misjudged French farce that does not travel well. Variety found it lacking focus. The César voters disagreed. I can see both sides. It is sentimental, chaotic, and committed to its own eccentricity. For classification purposes, it is a 2020 film that mostly predates the checklist. It earns small points for a woman's story and institutional critique. Everything else is absent. That is not a flaw. It is simply the result.