French comedies are a hit on the big screen but the viewer detects many similarities. To go further, the scriptwriter, cartoonist and colorist Yann Rambaud gives you all the recipes to make A good French romantic comedy.
What have we done to the good god… To have such a funny comic
The first pages of A Good French Romantic Comedy seem to set up a seventies thriller atmosphere in New York. A nice promise but the producer comes to interrupt everything because the budget would be too high. Instead, Yann Rambaud was commissioned to write a French comedy. To fulfill the specifications, A Good French Romantic Comedy compiles at first sight all the tricks of comedy made in France: an unlikely love at first sight, a neglected woman, expected twists … However, each line of dialogue contradicts the image and flips the book into absurd humor. Indeed, the author Yann Rambaud wants to show us all the codes of a popular genre from the most obvious to the most complex and hidden while making us laugh. Everything that is hidden becomes visible as the hidden advertisement occupying here the center of the image. The drawing bends to this program. It must be as close as possible to realism but also make you smile. For this, Yann Rambaud refuses the cartoon and approaches an apparent coldness close to Ruppert & Mulot. There is no exaggeration of the image but the characters immersed in impossible situations with improbable dialogues remain totally stoic. The black-tipped drawing on the first pages reproduces the atmosphere of a Scorcese thriller.
The humour in A Good French Romantic Comedy starts from the gap between the reader's horizons of expectation and the dialogues. In a market, asparagus, cucumbers and medium-long-term investments are sold. The characters rebel but just because the bread stick disappeared between two scenes. The colorization also brings a strangeness because all the boxes are in a shade of shades of blue. But the author also takes the opportunity to scratch French cinema. This involves dialogues so overwritten that they become ridiculous. Comics also become political when they talk about the rise of the far right.
Yann Rambaud 1- Les Tuches 0
A good French romantic comedy, edited by Delcourt, is also a lesson in cinema. The whole comic is structured like a movie. The story starts with boxes in panoramic view and then atmospheric scenes with revealing a full title page as a credits. Yann Rambaud includes a narrator who dissects the scenario and the staging of the box. It explains how to introduce the main character and shows that each director imprints a style even in the innocuous gesture of opening a door. This analysis does not make the comic book a theoretical work because each stereotype of the comedy is diverted to mock it: to present the story of a character, he tells his most intimate trauma by buying a wand. We even see special effects with the role of green backgrounds. Making a film becomes a recipe with essential ingredients but a lack of salt by the absence of humor.
The film criticism of A Good French Romantic Comedy also aims to demonstrate that it is not a pure art compared to comics that would be unsuitable to show the essential. Yann Rambaud explicitly shows that comics can do anything. His acid gaze also dismantles criticism. It values the vain pretension of certain auteur films while the author's references seem to value genre cinema. The author does not spare the viewer. Lacking openness, the public would only seek to recognize themselves on the big screen. We must constantly stimulate this authentication and ban the false fitting to prevent it from leaving the film.
Stop The Mask and the Feather, A Good French Romantic Comedy is currently the best cinema lesson. We understand the codes of cinema and the essential elements of a work for the general public in France… But above all, we often smile. Both through the image and the drawing, Yann Rambaud has fun making us laugh at the great successes of cinema. This diversion also seeks to show that popular French cinema lacks imagination and abuses certain codes. It is certain that once this book is closed, you will not watch movies in the same way.
You can find other chronicles from the Pataquès collection at Delcourt with La vie de ma mort and Les aventuriers du Mékong.
