The Gendarme and the Creatures from Outer Space (1979)

Ludovic Cruchot, a gendarme of advancing years and declining composure, learns that Saint-Tropez has been infiltrated by humanoid aliens who drink machine oil and sound like empty garbage cans when struck. This is the premise, and the film commits to it with the patience of a craftsman who has found one good joke and intends to sand it smooth. It is the fifth outing in a series that had, by 1979, settled into a comfortable formula: municipal order collapses, authority figures are stabbed with screwdrivers, and the Mediterranean sun shines on all of it without comment. The doppelganger gimmick arrives, does its work, and departs.

The classification work here is brief. There is very little to classify. The alien thirst for petroleum is a running gag about lubricants, not a parable of extraction and not a warning about the climate. The cast is white, French, and largely middle-aged. Women appear as wives and nuns, vehicles for a gag or a shrug. Race goes unmentioned as a subject. So does sexuality, so does the interior life of the body, so does the mind and its various weathers. Nothing is interrogated. Nothing is proposed. The film wants to spray a town with a fire hose and watch the guilty ones rust.

What remains is slapstick of genuine discipline, plus a faint melancholy that de Funès could summon without appearing to try. The gendarmes disguise themselves as aliens to bait aliens who have disguised themselves as gendarmes, and the resulting confusion is handled with the seriousness of a border checkpoint. Water is the weapon. Rust is the death. The film never pauses to explain why any of this ought to matter, because it does not accept that it must. We are left with a man twitching through a plot about robots and a town that will be fine by Tuesday. Sommelier's note: dry, metallic, unpretentious, best opened without expectations and finished before it warms.