Meet the Groseille family, every upscale parent's living nightmare and no doubt the shabbiest collection of trash outside of a John Waters film. Compare them to the Le Quesnoy household on the other side of the tracks: respectable, comfortably privileged, and soon to have their upper crust complacency shattered when a long-lost son, raised by the wayward Groseilles, returns home to corrupt his true family.
The film is a mixed bag, at best a mildly amusing social satire mocking the pretensions of a bourgeois yuppie lifestyle, but it's never clear if the prodigal son's lack of class is genetic or environmental: in other words, is the kid rotten because of his blue-collar upbringing or his white-collar breeding? The scenario also lacks the mean streak this kind of story needs. Except for the exploding car in the pre-credit prologue (a tremendous hook, barely acknowledged afterward) the film is perhaps too faithful to its title: long and quiet instead of short and nasty.
The film is a mixed bag, at best a mildly amusing social satire mocking the pretensions of a bourgeois yuppie lifestyle, but it's never clear if the prodigal son's lack of class is genetic or environmental: in other words, is the kid rotten because of his blue-collar upbringing or his white-collar breeding? The scenario also lacks the mean streak this kind of story needs. Except for the exploding car in the pre-credit prologue (a tremendous hook, barely acknowledged afterward) the film is perhaps too faithful to its title: long and quiet instead of short and nasty.