After having a run-in with a chef, a customs officer convinces him to help her daughter win a cooking competition.
As he prepares to go to his daughter Gaëlle (Lélia Nevert), who lives in Montreal, Victor (Édouard Baer), a French chef living in New York, runs into customs officer Sonia (Julie LeBreton) at the Canada-US border. Hated by the inhabitants of the border village because of her intransigence, Sonia confiscates Victor’s kitchen knives and some provisions, despite the protests of her colleague Michel (Dominic Paquet), who is less strict about the rules than she is.
Sonia soon regrets her gesture when her daughter Lili-Beth (Élodie Fontaine), whom she raises alone, announces to her that she wants to participate in a culinary competition. However, the little girl has no talent for cooking. Putting her pride aside, Sonia offers Victor to give him his knives in exchange for a few cooking lessons. Obsessed with competitions, the chef accepts the deal. In addition to Sonia’s father (Normand Chouinard), as well as her friends Sami (Oussama Fares) and Aya (Douaa Kachache), the mayor of the village (Michèle Deslauriers), the local grocer (Sylvain Marcel), seasonal workers, breeders and farmers in the region will come to the aid of the aspiring cordon bleu.
Manon Briand’s sixth feature film (Fluid turbulence, 2 seconds, Liverpool), Everyone is crazy! turns out to be an awkward hybrid between family comedy and romantic comedy. Full of good intentions, populated by characters bordering on caricature, intended to be a celebration of solidarity and diversity, the story evolves at a lethargic pace that even Yvann Thibaudeau’s playful editing cannot bring out of its torpor.
Unless you identify body and soul with the little heroine, as adorable as she is determined, young viewers risk getting bored stiff in front of this comedy devoid of a personal signature where the majority of jokes fall flat. We’ll pass on the family aspect. And what about the sentimental aspect?
By trying too hard to thwart the codes of romantic comedy, the filmmaker neglected to establish a semblance of budding complicity between the chief and the customs officer. No more butterflies in the stomach and eyes in the fat of beans! Not only does the current not flow between Baer and LeBreton, who are nevertheless not lacking in charm, nothing, apart from the fact that each has at heart the happiness of their respective daughter, justifies that their characters live a romance and that the spectator delights in it in advance.
If the chemistry works between Julie LeBreton, who shows aplomb as a woman who has cut herself off from her emotions, and the newcomer Élodie Fontaine, cute and endearing, it simply doesn’t work between the latter and Édouard Baer.
Having chosen him for his improvisational talents, his liveliness of mind and his formidable sense of repartee, Manon Briand seems to have stifled Édouard Baer in his creative impulses. Lost in this artificial rural universe, the French actor struggles to assert himself in the middle of a cast that hams it up to each other when it is not totally wasted. Rarely has he appeared so dull and lifeless on the big screen.
Finally, what is most surprising is that at no time, while the emblematic dishes of Paul Bocuse parade past, including the half-mourning chicken in a bladder, the fish in a crust and the fish in potato scales, which the little chefs are executing, Everyone is crazy! doesn’t make your mouth water or make you want to cook.
In the room
Check the movie schedule
Comedy
Everyone is crazy!
Manon Briand
Julie LeBreton, Elodie Fontaine, Edouard Baer
1 h 52