Max & Leon (2016)

Max & Leon arrives with the modest ambition of a wartime farce and the even more modest budget of one. Two shiftless Parisians, Max and Léon, spend 1939 through the Occupation doing everything in their power to avoid combat, impersonating Germans, then French captains, then secret agents, until they wash up in Syria and back into Vichy France. Director Jonathan Barré, working with the Palmashow comedy duo of Grégoire Ludig and David Marsais, has assembled a picaresque of uniforms and mistaken identity. Christopher Lambert appears briefly as a captain. Les Inrockuptibles reviewed the result as an ambitious but weak transfer to the big screen, which is the sort of faint praise that functions as a diagnosis.

There is nothing here for the cultural archivist to catalogue. The cast is uniformly white and French. The jokes concern cowardice, bureaucracy, and the difficulty of finding a decent meal in a war zone. No character pauses to interrogate the colonial dimensions of the Syrian mandate, a setting the screenplay treats as a change of scenery and nothing more. The women exist to be ogled or abandoned. The men exist to run. Class supplies gags about officers and their appetites, not grievances. The environment goes undiscussed, since the environment in a 1940 comedy is weather.

This is not a failing of the film. A slapstick romp about two idiots evading the Wehrmacht has no obligation to carry the moral freight of the century, and it does not pretend to. It wants to be funny, and by most accounts it is only intermittently so. We file it accordingly, in the drawer marked harmless.