Pardon Mon Affaire

How on earth does Étienne (Jean Rochefort), a married family man, end up on a window ledge high above the Champs-Élysées in Paris, wearing nothing but a bathrobe? Until recently, this respectable senior civil servant had nothing wicked, let alone improper, in mind. Fittingly, his misfortune began not at great heights but in an underground car park: when a gust of wind lifted the red dress of a beautiful stranger (Anny Duperey). From then on, Étienne clumsily tries to set up an affair with Charlotte. He seeks advice from his three friends, who, also in their forties, already have more than enough on their plates with mother-fixated neuroses, marital crises and unspoken longings. Jean-Loup Dabadie’s sharp screenplay combines generous helpings of situational comedy with a melancholy befitting the characters’ age. Behind the friends’ mishaps lies an astute portrait of a generation of men in the throes of a midlife crisis. The film ranks among the high points of 1970s French social comedy and was followed by a sequel, “Pardon Mon Affaire, Too!”. Hollywood remade the hit as “The Woman in Red” – and it’s no coincidence that the famous scene with the billowing red dress pays tribute to Marilyn Monroe. “A melancholy comedy, spiced with risqué wit, that portrays the tragicomic ‘midlife crisis’ of its heroes with gently ironic sympathy. East German title: MONSIEUR AUF ABWEGEN” (Lexikon des Internationalen Films)