User Reviews

This very old-fashioned French bedroom farce stars Remy Girard as Martin, a businessman who decides to return to his wife Brigitte (Coralie Seyrig) after a fling with Patricia (the annoying Sabine Haudepin). Patricia isn't willing to let him go without a fight, and Brigitte also has to deal with her paranoid current fling, Jean-Jacques (the amusing Patrick Chesnais), who thinks he is the subject of a Salman Rushdie-style fatwa and has gone into hiding. Also involved in the proceedings are the couple's grown up but still living at home children (Clement Thomas and Olga Vincent) and the family patriarch (veteran character actor Francoise Perier) who has problems of his own with some loan sharks. Though reasonably amusing, La Pagaille (The Big Mess) could have been made twenty years earlier than it was, and its racial attitudes look very dated indeed. It's not bad, but not worth going out of your way for either.