This oblique French comedy, directed and written by Jean-Pierre Sentier and Daniel Laloux, suggests a postnuclear Tati. On a deserted coastal island live two government functionaries (the authors) who have long been forgotten by the higher-ups who sent them there to discover a new way of manufacturing the wooden boxes for Camembert cheese. When the oversight is discovered, a meeting is held and a decision is reached: the cheese boxes aren’t much good unless they’re filled with cheese, so a cow is airlifted in (except the cow turns out to be a goat). Unfazed by the new arrival, the two men continue their zomboid existence, drawing on the island’s meager resources to construct ever more elaborate machines designed to perform ever more obscure functions. The antiutopian satire is sharply conceived and executed in an unflinching deadpan style; unfortunately, the aspects of modern life that Sentier and Laloux wish to attack—boredom, monotony, pointlessness—don’t make for a particularly dynamic comic rhythm. With Pierre Baillot and Alain Frerot (1983).
