BYE BYE MORONS : Tuesday 22nd June 2021.

I saw 'BYE BYE MORONS' at my local independent movie theatre this week, and this M Rated French comedy drama film is Directed, Written and stars the French Actor, film maker and screen writer Albert Dupontel whose previous Directorial credits take in the acclaimed 2013 '9 Month Stretch' and 2017's 'See You Up There'. The film received twelve nominations at the 46th Cesar Awards back in March this year where it won seven of those twelve nods including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Dupontel. The film was released in its native France back in late October last year and rose to the top of the Box Office despite the country being gripped by tight curfews due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  

And so, Suze Trappet (Virginie Efira) is in the office of her Doctor looking over some scanned images of her head, and nervous system. In a round about way he tells her that she is not long for this world having contracted auto-immune disease because of the various hair sprays she has ingested over the last twenty years in her job running a hair dressing salon. The Doctor attempts to evade the ultimate question from Suze about just how long she's got, saying that time is relative and time to him means something entirely different to her. She storms out of the office in bewilderment. 

Meanwhile, Jean-Baptiste Cuchas (Albert Dupontel) works as a Civil Servant who has just spent the past eighteen months installing and fine tuning a very sophisticated IT system into his place of work that controls everything from the lights, to the lifts, to the air conditioning together with facial and voice recognition for anyone and everyone who enters the building as well as their payroll data, tax affairs, relationship status, personal details and inside leg measurement. He gets an internal phone call from his boss, Mr. Kurtzman (Philippe Uchan) demanding he comes up to see him straight away. At that meeting Cuchas is told that he's being retrenched despite his technological brilliance because the organisation wants to be surrounded by fresher younger faces. To add insult to injury, he’ll be required to train these new younger fresh faced recruits before he leaves.

All of this cuts Cuchas to the core, and so he decides to commit suicide by shotgun in his office. He records his final farewell on his tablet, but his gun skills are no match for his computer skills and instead of killing himself he shoots a gaping hole through into the next office where Suze is sat trying to convince a clerk to investigate the whereabouts of her son who she had to give away thirty years earlier when she gave birth at just fifteen. The clerk sustains a fairly bad gunshot wound to the shoulder, and as Suze peers through the hole in the wall, Cuchas is surprised and lets off another round into the ceiling causing that to come crashing down on top of him. 

At that, blind panic breaks out amongst all the other workers in the office, who all charge from their workstations out of the building in mass hysteria. Suze meanwhile drags the unconscious Cuchas, whom she learned works in Internal Affairs, out of his now trashed office into the lift and into her car, and ends up parked on a roundabout that once was the site of the hospital she gave birth in thirty years previously. When Cuchas comes round shocked and surprised to discover where he is, Suze recruits him as her unsuspecting accomplice in tracking down her son, given that he worked for Internal Affairs at the local Council offices and therefore must be able to get her the inside word. If he doesn't co-operate she'll turn him over to the Police who already are on the hunt for him for his act of terrorism. Cuchas doesn't go along with her plan, so she drives off leaving him in the street. He eventually, however, relents and agrees to help her.

And so the pair go on the run armed with Cuchas' lap top computer to track down who's who in the zoo that can help Suze locate her son. They pay a visit to Serge Blin (Nicolas Marie) a man who was blinded in a Police shooting gone wrong many years ago and now works as a lone archivist in the Public Records Office located in the lower basement of the Council building. They trawl through all the 'T's in search of the records that show the details of Suze's birth and who her child may have been adopted by. They eventually strike pay dirt, just at the Police storm the room arresting Cuchas, but Suze and Blin flee through a back staircase. The pair pull up to the address where Suze's son is supposedly living, and she spies a man who could be her son sat on the step of the house playing with his phone. When she speaks to the man she's knows instantly that he's not her son. 

Meanwhile, Blin is stood beside the car when another car crashes into the back of it. The driver of the offending vehicle is furious that a blind man should be driving and threatens to call the Police. Panicked, Blin gets behind the wheel and drives off side swiping numerous vehicles as he does so, ultimately T-boning the Police vehicle that Cuchas was being driven back to the Police Station in. This causes the Police car to flip end of end landing on its roof. Cuchas is able to manoeuvre his way out of the car leaving Kurtzman, the driver and two other officers in the back seat hanging upside down and in a state of semi-consciousness. 

And so the three regroup and Cuchas' is able to track down Doctor Lint (Jackie Berroyer) who delivered Suze's child all those years ago. The only problem is that he's now living in a care home and has advanced Alzheimer's Disease and has no recollection of Suze, her child, or what went down that day. But by good providence, Lint's room also contains volumes of his hand written diaries, and thumbing through them Cuchas locates one of the date that is pertinent to Suze's quest. As the handwriting is in Doctor's scrawl, they track down Lint's wife Rose (Catherine Davenier) at her home in the suburbs and ask her to decipher his texts. She has limited success. However, later on Lint has a moment of clarity, and winds up at his family home reunited with Rose, and can now remember giving up Suze's newborn son to an adoptive couple who were much more deserving of the infant than handing it over to the State. 

This leads the threesome to the modest apartment of Suze's son Adrien (Bastien Ughetto) who now heads up the IT for a major city corporation. Adrien secretly has the hots for co-worker Clara (Marilou Aussilloux) but he is way to introverted to make any advances, is completely socially inept and would rather stare at his computer screens all day, and all night long, as he does when Suze first sees him through the window of his apartment. Later that evening Clara rides by on a scooter while Adrien waits at his front door for her to pass, and then ventures outside to go to work. 

This leads the trio to sit on a bench outside of the offices where they work, while Cuchas sets about controlling first the lights, then the fire alarms, then the sprinkler system and then the lifts in an attempt to evacuate the building and leave Adrien and Clara stranded alone in the external glass lift on the thirteenth floor. Success! With the pair alone in the lift Suze speaks to Adrien via the lap top into the lifts security system and tells him to tell Clara that he likes her, and that she always loved him. In the end the pair embrace, kiss and the lift is reactivated and comes down, by which time Suze and Cuchas have left as the Police arrive only to be distracted by Blin who causes a scene.

The pair flee to a car park where Cuchas uses his laptop to unlock and start up a vehicle but it is taking time. Meanwhile the Police have tracked down the pair which results in a Mexican standoff in the car park as Cuchas and Suze embrace in a passionate kiss, before the pair cry out 'bye bye morons'. 

The French are generally very good and making quirky, irreverent and somewhat out there feature films, and 'Bye Bye Morons' is no exception. The story makes for an entertaining brisk running time of 87 minutes and a lot of fun to follow. Dupontel, as Director here, embarks the trio on a journey of discovery and challenges along the way that he brings each time to a natural conclusion before starting them over again. As the Actor, Dupontel brings to the film a grounded confidence that sees him move from being a company yes man with all the nervous energy and jitters that go with it to being a confident self sacrificing protagonist and savvy sleuth by the time the end credits roll. Virginie Efira’s Suze is both feisty and comical, daring, driven and steadfast in her ultimate goal, with Nicholas Marie’s Serge who refuses to be defined by others and he has a certain force and is not afraid to use it. And as for the Police, they are seen here as unrelenting, unsympathetic, unfeeling and violent in their pursuit of justice no matter what the cost. 'Bye Bye Morons' is a film about life, about love, emotion, sacrifice, belonging and living in France's switched on, linked in, and zoned out society that bounces back and forth between satire, melodrama, mystery, tragedy, romance and dark comedy. Watch out for the Terry Gilliam cameo too. 

'Bye Bye Morons' warrants four claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a potential five claps. 

-Steve, at Odeon Online-