The ComDads

The ComDads (Les Compères, 1983) is a French comedy by Francis Veber that you can watch online on iFILM, starring Pierre Richard and Gérard Depardieu as two men with nothing in common except a woman's well-placed lie.

A mother's teenage son has run away. The police are useless. Out of options, she tracks down two former lovers and tells each of them, separately, that he is the boy's biological father. A diffident schoolteacher and a hard-nosed journalist both go looking — neither aware the other exists. When they finally meet, the film shifts into a rhythm of escalating friction that Veber paces without a wasted scene.

Richard and Depardieu had already worked together before this, and you can feel how precisely calibrated their dynamic is — the mild one quietly exasperating the tough one, the tough one steamrolling the mild one, until the roles quietly start to blur. Veber wrote the script himself, and the plot's clockwork logic is what makes the comedy hold up decades later. Stream The ComDads (1983) online on iFILM.