The Tuche Family (2011)

The Tuche family of Bouzolles live by a single creed: man is not made to work. Jeff, the patriarch, claims descent from the inventor of unemployment benefits and has spent his life honoring that inheritance with tremendous discipline. When a hundred million euros arrive by lottery, the clan decamps to Monaco to test whether wealth can be worn as comfortably as a tracksuit. It cannot, and that is the joke, repeated with the patience of a metronome for ninety-odd minutes.

The film is a class comedy, and we should be precise about what that means. It satirizes the nouveau riche and the old money alike, giving the Monaco set their share of absurdities, yet it never indicts capital. The fortune is celebrated, not interrogated. The anti-work philosophy carries a faint whiff of refusal, though it functions as a running gag about a man who simply prefers not to. Minority performers appear throughout the ensemble, unremarked and unhurried, folded into the village texture without commentary. There is no romantic subplot that argues a thesis, no character who exists to educate the audience, no moment where the screenplay stops to instruct. The youngest child is very bright. That is a punchline about a gifted kid, not a diagnosis.

What we have, then, is a broad crowd-pleaser that wants only to amuse, and largely does. It is a French commercial comedy of 2011, which is to say it arrived before the cultural weather turned and shows no interest in anticipating it. The film's politics amount to a shrug and a lottery ticket. We classify it accordingly, with the mild melancholy of a sommelier presented a bottle of very pleasant table wine and asked to score the terroir.