Bye Bye Morons

Back in March, after a year in which only a few months of cin­emago­ing was per­mit­ted due to the pan­dem­ic, France’s nation­al film awards – the Césars – saw Albert Dupontel’s Bye Bye Morons claim sev­en vic­to­ries from its 13 nom­i­na­tions. How­ev­er, this is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a mark­er of over­all qual­i­ty. With Dupon­tel tak­ing on direct­ing, screen­writ­ing and lead act­ing duties, Bye Bye Morons attempts to join the ranks of clas­sic French absur­dist come­dies – but miss­es a step and instead falls on its face, using far­ci­cal slap­stick through­out in place of gen­uine humour.

The film opens with two inde­pen­dent char­ac­ter threads that con­verge by chance, ren­der­ing them per­ma­nent­ly inter­wo­ven in a sort of com­e­dy of errors. These char­ac­ters are Suze Trap­pet (Vir­ginie Efi­ra), a mid­dle-aged woman issued with a death sen­tence after find­ing out she has an incred­i­bly rare and incur­able immune dis­ease, and Jean-Bap­tiste Cuchas (Albert Dupon­tel), tech­no­log­i­cal savant and direc­tor of sur­veil­lance and secu­ri­ty in some unspec­i­fied gov­ern­men­tal insti­tu­tion in Limoges.

After learn­ing of her fate, Suze decides to seek out the child she was forced to put up for adop­tion fol­low­ing her unplanned teenage preg­nan­cy, and when Jean-Bap­tiste is fired from the very build­ing where the fam­i­ly archives are stored, their paths cross and chaos ensues. Jean-Baptiste’s ear­li­er failed sui­cide attempt made it seem as though he was open­ing fire on his col­leagues, and when Suze finds a way to black­mail Jean-Bap­tiste through her pos­ses­sion of the evi­dence need­ed to acquit him, they become part­ners in crime on the jour­ney to find Suze’s son before she dies.

If the basic premise sounds ripe for comedic poten­tial, the moral­ly-dubi­ous script doesn’t do the idea jus­tice. Much of the intend­ed com­e­dy stems from the afore­men­tioned notion of self-harm, specif­i­cal­ly scenes fea­tur­ing the repeat­ed injury of Mon­sieur Blin (Nicholas Mar­ié), a blind archivist who becomes a vital mem­ber of Jean-Bap­tiste and Suze’s mission.

The excep­tion to the medi­oc­rity of Bye Bye Morons is Vir­ginie Efi­ra. Although hav­ing estab­lished her­self in Jus­tine Triet’s Sibyl and Cather­ine Corsini’s An Impos­si­ble Love, her pres­ence here seems like a down­grade. And yet, the con­straints of the mate­r­i­al do not suc­ceed in hold­ing her back, Efi­ra some­how man­ag­ing to deliv­er a gen­uine per­for­mance. Bye Bye Morons ulti­mate­ly tries so hard to be its own thing that it ends up rel­e­gat­ing itself to the scrapheap of C‑grade come­dies with pre­dictable out­comes and a poor­ly thought-out under­cur­rent of romance.