Weirdling_Wolf Review of French Postcards

French Postcards (1979)

The garishly goofy 'French Postcards' gets my stamp of approval!

[7/10 · 10 December 2021]

This fitfully flavoursome fromage about a naïve group of over-excitable American students experiencing a modestly hedonistic year of wine, women, and deliciously bad French rock music at a school in picturesque Paris, perhaps, offers the more forgiving, farce-minded viewers some fairly stale Poisson out of water shtick. These disparate, moderately endearing student protagonists 'studying' at the somewhat less-than august-looking 'Institute of French Studies' predictably fall into distinctly pre-digested food groups, the lonely, uptight wasp busybody (Blanche Baker), the nebbish nerd that somewhat miraculously gets the lava-hot mademoiselle (Miles Chapin), the self-appointed, would-be artisan Lothario (David Marshall Grant) who frustratingly gets the bums rush, and a youthful, barely used, quick-quipping Debra Winger form the savoury base of this salty bouillabaisse! There are noisome, sardonic skits about eating snails, clunky ruminations about the myriad, meaningless miasmas of human existence, a smattering of not so amiable couplings, some bemusingly bad, frisson-less bedroom farcing about, and a scintillatingly sexy sprinkle of groovy Gallic disco, plus an abjectly awful cameo by Mandy Patinkin as a skeezoid Iranian on the make, and legendary French Thespian Jean Rochefort's justifiably acerbic disdain for his students seems wholly genuine, and Huyck's sickly saccharine conclusion is nauseatingly glib, but, for reasons that momentarily elude me, there is something weirdly edifying about the ingenuous Miles Chapin heroically hooking up with a sublimely frisky French hottie (Valérie Quennessen), so, maybe, I somewhat reluctantly enjoyed the benign, wholesomely fluffy-headed frolics in 'French Postcards' a little more than I would be prepared to admit in public! The garishly goofy 'French Postcards gets my stamp of approval! All winsome word-japery aside, I genuinely dug on Lee Holdrige's magnifique score, and the gracefully beautiful Marie-France Pisier is truly mesmerizing to behold as wet dream supreme, the triumphantly titillating teacher Madame Catherine Tessier!