The Gendarme and the Gendarmettes (1982)

The Gendarme and the Gendarmettes is a 1982 French farce and the final outing for Louis de Funès. It arrives with a high-tech police office, four young female officers, pure chaos, and a kidnapping plot. The film's cultural awareness is mostly a period artifact. It has no sermon to deliver. The comedy is broad, physical, and preoccupied with ogling. The female officers are more competent than their male instructors, but the camera and script treat them as decorative. That competence is a plot device, not a thesis.

There is a Black actress among the gendarmettes, and the cast is slightly more representative than in previous installments. The film does nothing with race as a subject. A keyword about a transvestite points to a disguise gag, not an exploration of identity. The women's competence might look like a feminist gesture in isolation. The surrounding leering cancels it. Body positivity is absent by design: the film's entire engine is the male gaze at work, and it is not apologizing. Climate, class critique, neurodivergence, historical revisionism: none of these have any purchase here. The film is too busy with a runaway Citroën and a kidnapping plot.

The result is a harmless, dated French comedy that asks nothing of its audience beyond laughter at familiar faces. It is not preachy. It is not progressive in any modern sense. It is a time capsule of 1982 popular entertainment, with all the social assumptions that entails. We can note the competent women and the diverse cast member. We cannot pretend the film is making an argument. It is not. It simply wants to be funny, and it succeeds often enough to justify its place in the series. The cultural ledger remains largely blank.