Acting
Rosalie and LĂ©ontine go to the theater and are swept away by big emotions.
Rosalie moves into an apartment building, disturbing her neighbors above, below, and next to her.
Léontine helps her pal Rosalie (Sarah Duhamel) race against time to clean up a house after Rosalie’s boss, Baron von Hummen, announces that he and Madame will return home earlier than planned. They recruit workers and poach resources from a nearby construction site. As we see, it takes a village to tidy a house on short notice (or at least it should!), but there’s a limit to the capacities of even collective domestic labor. Accelerated productivity gives way to sheer physical anarchy and irreversible destruction. Dirt and debris pervade every surface—furniture and skin alike—leading to several unfortunate blackening gags.
Léontine goes on a dish-breaking rampage to protest her parents’ boring rules, so they kick her to the curb. She proceeds to terrorize the neighbors, tripping two men hauling large cartons by ensnaring them with pieces of string. She drops a pumpkin on a shopkeeper’s head, ties someone’s furniture to a moving vehicle, and then explodes fireworks inside a plumber’s protruding drainpipe. He puts out the flames in a tailspin by jumping into the river.
When Patouillard meets another woman at a street cafe, his jealous wife dresses up as a man in a suit and beard to spy on him.
Pétronille's husband jockey, Tortillard, face-plants in the middle of the track. She puts on his clothes and mounts his steed, “despite her rotund build” at 100 kilos. She leads the other riders on an off-track equestrian escapade, eventually making it back to the course.
LĂ©ontine cannot resist her desire to sail her new toy boat indoors. She plugs up the drains and turns on the faucets, flooding the house as water rains down through the floorboards and collapses the ceilings.
Anarchic physical destruction
A jolly housekeeper brings new meaning to the notion of “home entertainment” with a handsome new portable phonograph that causes people, furniture, and buildings to rock and roll through the magic of stop-motion animation. (MoMA)
Once Madame Ducordon discovers the joys of a new fashionable dance, she starts performing it wherever she happens to be.
No description available.
In a playful, reflexive take on the familiar “last-minute rescue” formula, a woman and her housekeeper left alone at home miss-read shadows projected from the street outside and fear a violent assault. Male police officers dispatched to rescue them correctly diagnose the situation, with hilarious results, including a late gender reveal. Notable for its early use of triptych.
The wife of Patouillard begs him for new clothes according to the latest fashion in the newspapers. So they go out for some shopping. Afterwards she is going out in her new dress, which is so tight that she can hardly walk in it. She changes the skirt for a pair of trousers, but finds herself being laughed at, and when the trousers get wet at the seaside, Patouillard finally puts her in a jute bag and makes her hop back home.
Wimpy Little Moritz needs to toughen up to win Rosalie, but ends up smashing everyone and everything in sight when boxing lessons turn him into a mindless fighting machine. (MoMA)
Jane has been elected the president of the Union of Cooks and Housemaids, and has just signed a resolution to improve their working conditions. Returning to the bourgeois family for which she works, Jane flexes her new-found power.
A couple’s fight over dinner leads to spiralling domestic abuse that spreads all over town. (MoMA)
Pétronille, a maid, borrows one of her employer's dress to go out with her boyfriend Onésime but the outfit is ruined during the meeting.
PĂ©tronille tries and fails to commit suicide, multiple ways, after her boyfriend Casimir dumps her. A morbid but amusing comedy.
Pétronille the kitchen maid is engaged to a marine who brings her a monkey named Joko from an exotic, unspecified country as a present. Pétronille attempts to hide Joko from her employers. Upon hearing strange noises from their cabinet, they impulsively draw their gun to shoot the intruder (or perhaps what they suspect to be a rat?). Joko provokes a massive chase across the city, climbing over chimneys, running over railway crossings, and diving into a fountain in a public park. This film showcases Duhamel’s talents as an indomitable comedienne. She is charismatic, cheeky, and athletic, with amazing facial expressions and great dramatic timing.
