Little Indian, Big City (1994)

Some films arrive at a cultural moment and some arrive to fill a slot in the winter holiday schedule. Little Indian, Big City belongs firmly to the latter, a 1994 French comedy that shipped a jungle boy to Paris and asked the audience to find the collision hilarious. The premise is sturdy enough: a commodities broker named Steph needs his long-lost wife's signature to marry again, discovers a teenage son raised among Amazonian villagers, and drags the boy back to the metropolis for a few days of culture shock. The Amazon exists here as a painted backdrop and a source of punchlines. Indigenous life is a comic curiosity, a place where the jokes write themselves and nobody checks the spelling. The boy is played by a white French adolescent, which the production appears to have regarded as a casting decision rather than a statement.

The film's politics are as thin as its plot. Steph's profession as a broker gets a light dusting of satire, the kind that winks at corporate greed without ever naming it, and the Parisian business world is mocked mostly for being full of men in suits. Patricia, the ex-wife, lives independently among the villagers and refuses to sign the papers, which is the closest the screenplay comes to giving a woman an interior life. She functions as a gatekeeper, not a person. There is no environmental argument to be found in the rainforest footage, no reckoning with race, no interest in the people whose home serves as the first act. The camera looks at the Amazon the way a tourist looks at a postcard.

This leaves a broad family comedy that lectures no one and means no harm, which is not the same as meaning well. It wants laughs, and it gets a few, mostly from the fish-out-of-water machinery. It does not want to teach, and it does not. There is something almost admirable in that refusal, or there would be, if the film were better.