Penny Pincher! (2016)

The 2016 French comedy Penny Pincher offers us François Gautier, a man whose commitment to thrift has hardened into an entire way of life. Dany Boon plays him with the rubbery dedication he has brought to a long career of broad Gallic farce. François falls in love, learns he has a daughter he never knew existed, and lies to conceal his condition. The original title, Radin, delivers the diagnosis more bluntly than the English ever could. Fred Cavayé directs with the brisk indifference of a man who knows exactly what he is selling. The Hollywood Reporter noted that the comic engine sputters out around the halfway mark, and that assessment has aged well.

On the question of modern social consciousness, the film is a barren field. The ensemble is uniformly white and untroubled by any thought of representation. Race does not exist here as a subject. Neither does sexuality. The women, a love interest and a surprise daughter, serve as narrative furniture for the male lead's emotional renovation. Climate anxiety does not intrude on a single frame. Body positivity has no purchase on a story about a man who refuses to buy a sandwich. His stinginess is a comic defect of character, never a window onto neurodivergence.

The closest the film comes to a position on anything is a soft ribbing of its hero's compulsion to hoard. Money gets teased, then the plot resolves into a homily about generosity and the warmth of family. The economic order itself escapes examination, which feels like the most French outcome available. There is no preaching, no moral instruction, no index finger aimed at the audience. It wants only to be funny, and it manages this intermittently. A viewer leaves with the sense of a pleasant, weightless thing, harmless and already half-forgotten.