La Chèvre (1981)

La Chèvre arrives from 1981 with the quiet confidence of a film that has no interest in instructing anyone about anything. Francis Veber's buddy comedy concerns a Parisian accountant named François Perrin, a man whose life is an unbroken chain of small disasters, and the hardened private detective Campana, dispatched to Mexico to find a kidnapped heiress. The psychologist's theory is elegant in its absurdity: send the unluckiest man alive to retrace the missing woman's steps, and misfortune itself will lead the way. What follows is a French-Mexican co-production that treats Puerto Vallarta and the surrounding jungle as a playground for slapstick and nothing more. The local police captain, the prisoner, the bar prostitute, the kidnappers: all of them exist to service the mechanics of the chase. Their presence is unremarked, untheorized, and entirely functional, which is to say the film casts them and moves on.

The kidnapped daughter, Marie Bens, is less a character than a destination. She appears in the final reel, sleepwalking beside Perrin, a plot device with a pulse. The film has no interest in her interior life, no argument to make about women, wealth, or the country it borrows for its third act. Perrin's affliction, meanwhile, is played strictly for laughs. Nobody names it, diagnoses it, or suggests he deserves accommodation. He falls through broken chairs because it is funny, and the film never once suggests otherwise. The rainforest is an obstacle course. The CEO's money is a plot convenience. There is no sermon waiting in the underbrush.

To watch La Chèvre now is to encounter a relic from a less self-conscious era of moviemaking, one in which a man could be pursued across two continents by pure bad luck and nobody felt compelled to extract a lesson from it. It is brisk, well-mannered farce, and it asks nothing of its audience beyond a willingness to laugh at a collapsing dock. The film registers a clean zero on every measure of contemporary social instruction, not through any failure of craft, but through total indifference to the project. It simply wants to be funny. In 1981, that was apparently enough. The American remake, Pure Luck, would arrive a decade later and change nothing of consequence, which is itself a kind of data point worth filing away in the cabinet of harmless entertainments.

It is, in the end, a goat of a movie: stubborn, unburdened, and entirely unaware that it was ever supposed to carry a message. We classify it accordingly, with a clear conscience and a mild sense of relief that not everything from the period demands a lecture in return for its laughs. The Italian exhibition of this film is remembered for a tragedy unrelated to its content, a grim footnote that the movie itself could never have anticipated. The picture on screen remains what it always was, a caper about luck, and nothing else besides.