Their sendup of religious fundamentalism is painted in broad acrylic strokes: shocking enough to elicit laughs but not deep enough to generate understanding.
But his nimble intelligence and excellent eye failed to produce more than a pictorial pastiche that was flat and one-dimensional or a shallow sendup of the past.
The movie is full of inspired touches as well as excessive ones: its appeal lies in the way its humor always treads the line between sendup and campy overkill.
At this distance not just from France but from the France of the '60s the film's social criticism seems quaint: Jean-Louis, his wife Suzanne (Sandrine Kiberlain) and their rigid friends and associates could be fugitives from a Jacques Tati sendup of bourgeois foibles.