Santa Claus Is a Stinker (1982)

Le Père Noël est une ordure arrived in 1982, three years after the Le Splendid troupe first staged it in a Paris theater, and it carries the fingerprints of the stage: a single set, a door that keeps swinging open, and a cast of misfits who cannot leave each other alone. Two volunteers staff a suicide hotline on Christmas Eve. The elevator is broken. Into this confinement wander a pregnant woman fleeing a fiancé who beats her, a melancholy cross-dresser with an unrequited crush, and a neighbor bearing pastries of uncertain origin. The film wants nothing from us but laughter, and it gets it.

The social inventory here is thin, and honest about being thin. Katia's transvestism is a 1982 comic device, played for the titters of a theater audience, with no interest in the interior life of the character beyond the joke. Josette is pregnant and on the run from a violent man, and the film treats this as a plot engine, not a grievance to be aired. The women are foils. The men are worse. Nobody learns anything, which is the point of a farce. The ensemble is the troupe itself, ten performers chosen for timing and chemistry instead of any representational ambition, and the picture is better for it.

The picture stays alive because it refuses to sermonize. There is no lesson, no cause, no ledger of virtue to be balanced by the closing credits. Preskovitch and his pastries exist because Josiane Balasko ate something strange in Croatia and thought it funny. That is the entire moral universe of this film, and it holds up better than most of what followed. A remake was attempted in America in 1994. It did not survive.