The Cabbage Soup (1981)
Directed by Jean Girault
No — The Cabbage Soup is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Two aging farmers, Le Glaude and Le Bombé, spend their days drinking and eating cabbage soup, and their nights engaged in flatulence of sufficient force to summon a visitor from the planet Oxo.
Consciousness Markers
A mild critique of modernization and land development exists via the mayor's housing project displacing the old farmers, but it is nostalgic rather than an anti-capitalist wealth critique.
The film is a gentle, playful comedy with only a faint nostalgic undertone about rural life; it never preaches.
The cast is entirely white French actors with no diversity casting or representation-conscious choices.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film.
The resurrected wife exists only as a plot device who immediately runs off with a younger man; no feminist themes are present.
The film engages no racial themes or commentary whatsoever.
There is no environmental or climate messaging; the rural-versus-modern tension is nostalgic, not ecological.
The film's farting and drinking humor is scatological comedy, not body-positivity messaging.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are present.
The film is a fictional sci-fi comedy with no historical revisionism.
Why it received this score
Two aging farmers, Le Glaude and Le Bombé, spend their days drinking and eating cabbage soup, and their nights engaged in flatulence of sufficient force to summon a visitor from the planet Oxo. The alien arrives, acquires French, duplicates a gold coin, briefly resurrects Le Glaude's late wife at the age of twenty, and eventually offers the men, their cat, and their farms a new life among the Oxonians. Jean Girault directed this 1981 adaptation of René Fallet's novel, and it was the penultimate film for Louis de Funès. The comedy is scatological, gentle, and untroubled by the questions that occupy the contemporary cultural apparatus.
The cast is uniformly white and French, and the film makes no comment on the fact. There is no romantic or identity subtext beyond the men's friendship. The resurrected wife exists to run off to Paris with a younger man inside a day, a device and nothing more. Race does not enter the frame. The environment does not enter the frame either; the friction between the old farmers and the mayor's housing project is a sigh of nostalgia for a vanishing rural France, not an indictment of capital. The mayor fences the men off and the townspeople throw popcorn at them, which is a mild rebuke of development delivered without conviction. The flatulence is comedy about the body, not advocacy on its behalf. No character is marked as neurodivergent. No history is revised.
What remains is a film that lectures no one. Its nostalgia is soft, its argument is that cabbage soup is good and modernity is rude, and it delivers this with a shrug. It is a relic of an era before the culture decided that entertainment owed us a position paper. As a specimen, it is nearly inert, and there is something restful about that.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Two buddy farmers are visited by aliens who like their domestic cabbage soup.
Questions about The Cabbage Soup
Is The Cabbage Soup woke?
No — The Cabbage Soup is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Cabbage Soup have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Eat the Rich at 10.
How does The Cabbage Soup compare to other 1981 movies?
It ranks #12 of the 43 films from 1981 we've scored; their average is 5. The wokest is The Fox and the Hound (18).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.