So here’s the best performing domestic film at the French box office in 1976. The Wing or the Thigh (L’aile ou la cuisse) also did well against foreign competition, coming in second overall to Les Dents de la mer (Teeth of the Sea, literally), as Jaws was called in France.
It’s a lively farce set in the world of the restaurant, more specifically the world of the restaurant guide, with Louis de Funès playing Charles Duchemin, the big noise behind the Guide Duchemin, the bible that hands out stars to the aspiring and the established and can make or break a reputation. The Michelin is the obvious idea – the colours and the fonts say as much.
Before the action gets going, we meet Charles in two establishing scenes. At a snooty French restaurant, Charles is totally ignored while the owner and waiting staff fawn over a guy they reckon is an inspector from Duchemin. They’re right, he is. But Charles has gone along disguised as a woman, just in case something like this happened, to see how the average customer is treated. Later, Charles (now out of drag) delights in showing a friend an out-of-the-way Japanese place where the food is delicious and the waiter puts on a display of remarkable knife skills. So that’s Charles – open and enthusiastic, a man who hasn’t been corrupted by years at the top of his game.
But will the Guide Duchemin be the same once Charles steps back and hands it on to his son, as he shortly intends to? Gérard (Coluche) is going along with his father’s plans but his heart isn’t in it. He really wants to be a clown, and has for quite a while been secretly financing a circus with dad’s money.
Further potential for farce arrives in the shape of Marguerite (Ann Zacharias), the young, hot and very direct new secretary Charles hires but Gérard fancies like crazy. And in the form of Jacques Tricatel (Julien Guiomar), a purveyor of ultra-processed food who would single-handedly bring French cuisine to its knees if only men like Charles and his confounded guide weren’t keeping standards up. And yet more later on, when Charles loses his sense of taste at precisely the moment he needs it most.
There are scenes set in restaurants good, bad and terrible, scenes with Gérard, with Marguerite, with dastardly Tricatel and even at the circus. Imagine Fawlty Towers meets Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares as rewritten by Jacques Tati – it’s big, it’s broad, it could all almost be done as a silent movie and the modern world is deeply suspect.
It’s also relentlessly ridiculous but moves so fast that its disconnect with reality has no time to sink in.
This film marked the comeback after a heart attack of Funès, one of the lions of the French box office during the 1960s and 1970s. He’s determined to show he still has it, and he has, going at his role with the fierce energy and mobile features his audiences expected. Funès insisted on equal billing for Coluche, who brings a tragic Zero Mostel-esque energy to the role of Gérard. Ann Zacharias holds her own against these two as the bubbly and smart Marguerite, and Guiomar play Tricatel as a Bond villain manqué, doing everything short of stroking a white cat.
There is slapstick, bum jokes, sex jokes, a car chase, a runaway crane, a runaway factory conveyor belt. It’s lit in that very bright Pink Panther way by Claude Renoir (grandson of the Impressionist Pierre-Auguste) and is directed at the only pace that would really work – fast and tight – by Claude Zidi.
It’s a 1960s movie that’s somehow limped into the 1970s but the figure of Tricatel and his ultra-processed glop posing as food resonates right into the 21st century. On a TV show where he’s involved in a debate against Charles Duchemin, Tricatel defends his slow murder of French cuisine by claiming to be the saviour of the masses from the liberal elites, the populist argument wheeled out by grifters everywhere when they’ve run out of things to say.
So, contemporary relevance too. Though the whole thing is so full of characters, locations and action that you may be too exhausted to take it in.
The Wing or the Thigh (L’aile ou la cuisse) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
