The Tuche Family: The American Dream (2016)

The second installment in the Tuche saga follows a French family of modest means who win the lottery and dispatch their son Donald to Los Angeles, where he enrolls at a university and courts Jennifer, the daughter of a wealthy American financier. The premise is a fish-out-of-water farce, executed with the enthusiasm of a man who has just discovered that Americans say "awesome" a great deal. The comedy trades in broad national stereotypes on both sides of the Atlantic, and the result is a film that regards cultural difference as a reliable source of pratfalls. There is a Black character, Georges Diouf, and a Native character credited simply as Indian. They function as comic fixtures, present for the joke rather than for any statement about who gets to be on screen. That is the extent of the film's social ambition, and it is not ambition at all. It is furniture.

The picture has no interest in the questions that occupy more earnest cinema. No character grapples with identity, no relationship interrogates power, no subplot gestures toward the climate or the sins of capital. The Tuches acquire money and the film treats this as unambiguously wonderful, culminating in warm proximity to a famous financier. Women appear as wives, mothers, and romantic prizes, and the camera regards them exactly as the script does, which is to say briefly. Physical comedy is aimed at bodies, not at body image, and the humor is directed at appearance in the oldest and least generous tradition. A reviewer for The Hollywood Reporter found the whole affair puerile and naive when it was not straightforwardly moronic, and flagged the ethnic gags as something that reads very differently outside France. That assessment holds.

What we have, then, is a sequel that sold nearly five million tickets at home and asks nothing of its audience beyond a willingness to laugh at accents. It is a machine for jokes, most of them about foreigners, and it runs without a message, a cause, or a lesson. Some films arrive with a thesis. This one arrives with a lottery ticket and a plane to Los Angeles, and it means every harmless thing it says.