Gregoire Moulin review

It's puzzling that such a mediocre French comedy, lacking in any star names, should get UK distribution.

Written and directed by Artus De Penguern, who played the writer in Amélie, it's the tiresome tale of a lowly insurance clerk Gregoire Moulin (De Penguern himself), whose life has been cursed by bad luck ever since he was born in the Franz Kafka clinic. Having arranged to meet up with the girl of his dreams, dance teacher Odile (Pascale Arbillot), Gregoire discovers that Paris is in the grip of Cup Final Fever, while a simple errand for a work colleague leads to unexpected misadventures.

Pursued by a variety of `quirky' characters (a predatory bisexual doctor, a volatile cab-driver, a quartet of football hooligans and so on), our sad-eyed schmuck finds himself stumbling from situation to situation with zero comic ingenuity. But that's not all that's wrong with this grating farce: Odile's Madame Bovary-style fantasy sequences are laboured, there's a lazy reliance on (uninspired) gunplay and a male rape is dubiously played for laughs.