French Fried Vacations 3: Friends Forever (2006)

Twenty-seven years after the ski slopes, the Splendid troupe reconvenes at a Sardinian luxury hotel to discover that time has been unkind to everyone except the payroll. Patrice Leconte directs his aging revelers through the same rituals of bed-hopping and bickering that sustained them in 1978, only now with mortgages and varicose anxieties. The film knows exactly what its audience wants, which is to watch familiar faces behave badly in expensive linen. It delivers that with workmanlike efficiency and no visible ambition beyond it.

There are gestures toward contemporary social matters, though none of them linger. Bernard and Nathalie's son appears to announce a civil union with an older man, a development Nathalie promptly weaponizes against her husband's outrage. The film treats this as farce, not affirmation, which is at least honest about its priorities. Graziella eventually evicts her philandering husband, and Nathalie extracts her revenge, so the women are permitted a measure of agency between the leering set pieces. The closing sequence bundles the French vacationers onto vans alongside a boatload of North African migrants bound for an internment camp. It is a satirical flicker, gone before it can mean anything, and the film has no interest in pursuing it further.

The finished product is a broad, ribald comedy of silicon breasts, sect members, and opticians' money, none of it offered as commentary. The wealth on display is a prop for vanity, not an indictment. The bodies on display are punchlines, not celebrations. There is no environmental conscience, no neurological curiosity, no historical argument, no sermon. The film simply wants to amuse its aging public, and it does so with the grim determination of a reunion nobody planned well. For students of cultural messaging, the pickings are slim and the tone is cheerfully reactionary. It is a sequel, and it knows its job.