The Magic Tuche (2018)

The third installment in the Tuche family saga arrives with a premise that sounds, on paper, like political satire. Jeff Tuche, a provincial everyman, learns that the new high-speed rail line will pass near his village of Bouzolles without stopping there. He petitions the President. He is ignored. He runs for office and wins. This is the machinery of populist fantasy, and it could have carried a message about neglected regions and distant elites. The film has no interest in that message. It wants Jeff inside the Elysee so it can knock over the furniture.

The comedy is broad, warm, and entirely untroubled by ideology. The cast is white and French, with Ralph Amoussou appearing as Georges Diouf, a figure who exists in the margins and invites no reflection on race, empire, or inequality. Cathy Tuche remains a wife and mother within a conventional family-comedy frame, and the film offers no gender critique. There are no queer characters, no climate concerns, no body-positivity gestures, no neurodivergent portrayals. The occasional jab at political elites is slapstick, not economics. A rural man storms the capital and the target is his own clumsiness, not the system.

Which leaves us with a classification problem of the mildest sort. This is a crowd-pleaser built to fill seats and sell tickets to the fourth and fifth entries, and it succeeds at that modest ambition. The social observation is incidental and unserious. We grade it accordingly, without malice. A farce about a fictional election is not revisionist history, and a Frenchman who wants a train stop is not a revolutionary. The sommelier swirls the glass, finds it pleasant, uncomplicated, and entirely without a political aftertaste, and moves on to the next bottle.