RRRrrrr!!! (2004)

There is a particular subspecies of French comedy that arrives without apology, commits fully to its own absurdity, and departs having taught us nothing. RRRrrrr!!! belongs to that lineage. Alain Chabat, working from a premise so thin it might be a cave painting, imagines the Stone Age as a bureaucratic nightmare in which two tribes, the Clean Hairs and the Dirty Hairs, have spent eight hundred years feuding over shampoo. A murder occurs. An investigation follows. Two men named Pierre are dispatched to solve it. The film regards all of this with the solemnity of a procedural and the intelligence of a whoopee cushion, which is, I concede, the intended effect.

The cast is a wall of familiar French comic faces, uniformly pale and uniformly committed to grunting. Marina Foïs plays the chief's daughter, sent in disguise to infiltrate the enemy tribe, a plot mechanism that exists to generate jokes about wigs and does not trouble itself with anything further. No character arrives carrying a message. No tribe represents anything but the next gag. The murder investigation, billed as the first in human history, is a structural excuse for slapstick, not a meditation on justice, prejudice, or the human condition. Gérard Depardieu appears. Jean Rochefort appears. Both are good sports about it.

What we have, then, is a film that wants nothing from us except laughter and gives nothing back except the occasional one. It was a box office failure, which is its own kind of honesty. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no moment where a character turns to camera and explains how we ought to live. Just cavemen, shampoo, and the sound of a joke landing somewhere in the vicinity of the target. I have sat through films that scolded me for two hours. This one asked only that I stop thinking. I complied.