Inspector Blunder

Inspector Blunder (Inspecteur La Bavure, 1980) is a French comedy directed by Claude Zidi, available to watch online on iFILM. It pairs Coluche — one of the defining comic performers of his generation in France — with a young Gérard Depardieu.

Clément is the son of a celebrated detective and has just graduated from the police academy, dead last in his class. On his first day he is mistaken for a criminal. Shortly after, his near-pathological gullibility leads him to unknowingly assist a career criminal in kidnapping a TV journalist — who had, on air, questioned a mobster's toughness and triggered the whole chain of events. Once Clément grasps what he has done, he sets out to fix it, with the kind of enthusiasm that tends to make things considerably worse.

Zidi built the film around Coluche's specific gift: the ability to play someone absolutely certain he is doing the right thing while the evidence piles up to the contrary. Depardieu, playing it straight against him, gives the comedy its friction. A loose, good-natured 97 minutes that holds up well as a snapshot of French popular cinema at the turn of the eighties. Stream Inspector Blunder (1980) online on iFILM.