The Visitors II: The Corridors of Time (1998)

Sequels to broad French farces rarely arrive bearing an agenda, and this one arrives with nothing beyond a bucket of ice cream and a plunger. Jean-Marie Poiré reunites his medieval ruffians and sends them shuttling between the twelfth century, the present day, and, briefly, Revolutionary France, where Napoleon's court becomes a backdrop for a mistaken-identity gag. The corridors of time are held open by stolen jewels, a premise that exists to move bodies from one set piece to the next. Nobody pauses to reflect on the arrangement. That is the point. This is a machine for slapstick, and it runs.

The comedy is physical and crude. A water torture sequence inflates a man's belly until his navel protrudes, a wedding is disrupted by dessert poured down a woman's dress, and a servant urinates his way through a hotel corridor. These are not offered as arguments about anything. The supermarket robbery that opens the modern-day thread and the brand placement that annoyed French critics are comic furniture, not a thesis about commerce. The film has no interest in gender, race, class, or the natural world, and it never pretends otherwise. Its women are brides, wives, and foils. Its men are knights, dentists, and fools.

What the film does possess is a talent for collision. Medieval men gawp at televisions and automobiles, and we are invited to laugh at the meeting of eras, not to learn from it. There is no sermon waiting at the end, no lesson about tolerance, history, or the planet. The Revolution appears for a single closing joke and is gone. A sequel that wants ninety minutes of laughter and nothing more is a modest ambition, and this one meets it. On every front that concerns the contemporary cultural critic, the film is a blank page, and it seems entirely at peace with that.