Watch out, spoilers!
—----------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------
Another French comedy with Louis de Funes, about which I have read more than once, but still could not gather to watch, but here I am going - this satirical comedy Gerard Urie "The Adventures of Rabbi Jacob" / Les aventures de Rabbi Jacob, 1973. I didn’t expect too much from this film, and I must admit that I watched it with some effort, it was too full of all sorts of “things-hooks”, which I am not a fan, including the performance of Louis de Funes. In this film, he plays a rather wealthy rich and industrialist Victor Peever (surprisingly, with the depicted character, this hero has achieved anything at all, well, come on), a racist and anti-Semite who does not know, it is true, that his driver Solomon is a Jew who is in a hurry to his daughter’s wedding. When things start to go awry, Solomon refuses to help him for a while, as the Sabbath begins, and he fires him, and then he goes. He encounters a Muslim, Slimane, who is pursued by a colonel in his country and wants to be shot, and they flee together, while they are still being pursued by the police. In parallel (much more modest) develops the story of the real Rabbi Jacob, flying from New York to the bar mitzvah of his relative with a young rabbi. The brewer and Slimane encounter them in the toilet, where they dream of dressing up as rabbis, and then trying to portray them to the jubilation of the Jewish community, which includes his driver Solomon, who is a relative of Rabbi Jacob. There are a lot of things going on, but the end is happy.
Of course, I understand that this exaggerated grotesque style was chosen by the director intentionally, but for me it was somewhat excessive.