- Actors: François Cluzet, Guillaume Depardieu, Judith Henry, Claire Laroche, Philippe Girard
- Directors: Pierre Salvadori
- Writers: Pierre Salvadori, Franck Bauchard, Marc Syrigas, Nicolas Cuche, Philippe Harel
- Producers: Gérard Louvin, Philippe Martin
- Format: PAL
- Language French
- Subtitles: English
- Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
- Number of discs: 1
- Classification: 15
- Studio: BLUEBELL FILMS
- DVD Release Date: 2 April 2007
- Run Time: 95 minutes
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- ASIN: B000NO1SHM
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 70,415 in Film & TV (See Top 100 in Film & TV)
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United Kingdom released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: LANGUAGES: English ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ), SPECIAL FEATURES: Interactive Menu, Scene Access, SYNOPSIS: Black comedy about two best friends, one a budding playwright and the other a motorbike freak, who spend their time annoying their girlfriends and getting into various scrapes. Things turn nasty, however, when the pair are caught burgling the offices of a karate magazine, the consequences of which sends the playwright into a spiraling bout of depression. ...The Apprentice ( Les Apprentis )
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Love, friendship... and mental illness,
By
This review is from: Les Apprentis [DVD] [1996] (DVD)
Les Apprentis is the sort of French film that even determined Francophobes can warm to. No arty shots of Paris; no thirty-somethings debating Pascal's wager at dinner parties. Instead, this deadpan social comedy follows two deadbeats, Fred and Antoine, who live on pocket-sized food stolen from supermarkets, drink cheap booze and have conversations about anything from palpitations to urination. They move through a world of peeling wallpaper, dirty windows and wing-collared seventies shirts in a film that's proud to be shabby-looking.
They're not quite Laurel and Hardy, but the two leads still get laughs just for looking a bit silly together. Lanky, gangling Depardieu (son of Gerard) is an excellent foil for the more compact and traditionally French-looking Cluzet, who gets all the wisecracks while Depardieu's force of nature, Fred, relies on his laissez-faire charm. If Les Apprentis was American it would have been awful. As it is, there's mercifully little comedy of the `stoner dude' variety, and in spite of some casually smutty dialogue there's not a gratuitous nipple in sight. Don't believe the Mail on Sunday whose reviewer reckoned this was the `French Withnail & I' - it's nowhere near as caustic. There are plenty of one-liners but none of the catchphrases that Withnail was blessed (or cursed?) with, and for all its gloominess Les Apprentis is basically a feelgood film about feeling bad.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"He has an astonishing capacity to do nothing.",
By
This review is from: Les Apprentis [DVD] [1996] (DVD)
First things first. Despite the claims on the DVD sleeve, this is no French Withnail and I and despite reuniting writer-director Pierre Salvadori and actors Guillaume Depardieu and (briefly) Marie Trintignant, Les Apprentis is no Wild Target either. But while this ambling comedy about two slackers faced with the imminent loss of the that they've been staying in rent-free for several years (the kind of flat you can practically smell through the TV screen) lacks the structure of Salvadori's hitman comedy, it does share much of its dryly understated sense of humor and its affection for misfits who can't really adapt to the everyday world.
Francois Cluzet is the would-be playwright making a precarious living from cash-in-hand articles for a karate magazine and compiling increasingly morbid crosswords who moves into a flat with Guillaume Depardieu's slacker just for a few days to get over a split with his girlfriend while he tries to find somewhere else. Five years later he's still there no further on, killing time, achieving nothing, learning nothing while waiting for his life to start, though, unlike Depardieu's occasional shoplifter, he's starting to get depressed by it all. The nature of the two leads' existence rubs off on the film, which more or less takes their lead and ambles along without ever really getting anywhere, following Cluzet's mood swings and seasoning it with the odd joke here and there to ward off the desperation and somehow managing to avoid succumbing to the leads' lethargy itself. Even though one of them eventually gives in to clinical depression it's never really a dark film, but despite throwing in some comic setpieces like a clumsy break-in to raise a deposit for a new flat or a great opening sequence that gets laughs out of the sound of paper being rolled into a ball, it's never really a laugh a minute either. Yet while Salvadori never really hits the highs, there are enough understated gems along the way to keep you watching without feeling you've wasted your time watching them waste their time. Unfortunately the extras-free UK DVD from Bluebell Films is quite poor quality, a 1.66:1 widescreen transfer with burnt-in unremoveable subtitles that looks like it was copied from a videotape copy.
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