At one point during Bye Bye Morons, Terry Gilliam turns up in a cameo as a weapons vendor in an infomercial, hawking pistols and shotguns with trademark zeal. Gilliam’s presence, as well as an on-screen dedication to Terry Jones, is a marker for writer-director-star Albert Dupontel’s farce with a heart, which takes some of the crazy invention and nutty energy of Monty Python and injects it into a story of fragile human beings at their wits’ end. If not all the jokes land, it is the kind of crowd-pleasing French comedy that stands as a corrective to the pervading UK view of Gallic cinema as Juliette-Binoche-Stares-Pensively-Out-Of-Windows movies.
The mad-cap plot brings together two disparate, desperate characters: hairdresser Suze Trappet (Virginie Efira) who, suffering from a terminal auto-immune disease, decides to look for the son she abandoned when she was 15; and IT security expert Jean-Baptiste Cuchas (Dupontel), side-lined from his beloved job by younger upstarts, who plans to commit suicide on a live video link-up, yelling to his bosses, “Bye-bye, morons!” as he shoots himself. Their paths cross when Cuchas’ plans go awry and Suze needs a computer-literate bod to help find the files on her son.
Dupontel skilfully juggles the farcical elements without ever diluting the emotional resonance.
It’s a slick, entertaining start — including a fun, grainy flashback to Suze’s youth — that explodes into a cross-city hunt, in which Suze and Jean-Baptiste enlist the help of a blind archivist (a scene-stealing turn by Nicolas Marié) to help find the missing boy’s contact details. So, we get last-minute escapes, a frenetic car chase (of course, the blind archivist gets behind the wheel) and pauses for breath (Jackie Berroyer’s obstetrician, who’s stricken with Alzheimer’s, can’t remember key details of Suze’s child). Dupontel skilfully juggles the farcical elements without ever diluting the emotional resonance and, as the film moves into its final third, finds a mile-wide emotional streak that feels earned and affecting.
Not all of it works, and the hodgepodge of themes — from the crushing nature of bureaucracy (hello, Gilliam’s Brazil) to timidity in love via the dangers of living life with no digital footprint — feels scattershot. What sticks is the growing connection between Suze and Jean-Baptiste, their chemistry neatly evinced by Efira and Dupontel. They are the glue that holds the high-octane ride together. Jump on board.