Fatal (2010)

This is a 2010 French comedy built around Michaël Youn's long-running character Fatal Bazooka, a bling-encrusted rapper with a fashion line, a magazine, and an amusement park on the drawing board. The story follows his fall from the summit of the music business and the indignities that trail him downward. The film's ambitions are modest and its methods are loud. It wants us to laugh at the absurdities of celebrity, and it chases that goal with scattershot energy.

The comedy here is aggressively retrograde. Jokes about women, weight, sex, and race arrive without apology and without a thesis behind them. The music industry gets skewered, but the skewering is affectionate, a celebration of excess wearing the mask of mockery. Nothing in the film proposes that the machinery of stardom ought to be dismantled. The machinery is the joke, and the joke is fond of it. Race surfaces in the rap parodies as material for broad laughs, never as a subject for systemic critique.

In the ledger of contemporary social consciousness, this leaves an empty column. The cast is diverse, yet the diversity is unremarked and untheorized, simply the natural composition of a French comedy ensemble. No character wrestles with identity, no subplot gestures toward equity, no speech instructs the audience on how to feel. The environment, the body, the mind, the record of history: none of these are contested terrain here. The humor predates our current sensitivities and shows no interest in catching up. It is crude, silly, and entirely content to be so. We file it accordingly, with the weary precision the task demands.