Alain Charlot

Lace up your boots, stock up on beans, and practice your slap-fighting skills: the most popular duo in “popcorn” cinema from the 1970s through the early 1980s is back in Julien Doubois’ documentary “Terence Hill, Bud Spencer… and Me”, written by Philippe Lombard. To recount the cinematic saga of the two friends and pay them a sincere and passionate tribute, Philippe went all out, setting out himself in the duo’s footsteps across Europe, even going so far as to eat beans on camera, all while bringing together a circle of knowledgeable and enthusiastic contributors. Snubbed by critics, mocked by the know-it-alls, absent from anthologies and retrospectives, yet adored by the general public. The smart, handsome guy and the clumsy oaf. A brand of cinema whose pace, gags, stunts, good cheer, audience, and humor are reminiscent of the circus.

They’ve become the human face of inhuman barbarity. Leaders like Hitler, Idi Amin Dada, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu, Bokassa, Muammar Kadhafi, Khomeini, Mussolini and Franco governed their countries completely cut off from reality. These paranoid leaders were driven to abuse their power by the pathology of power itself. Dictators are driven by a relentless, thought-out determination to impose themselves as infallible, all-knowing and all-powerful beings. But they are also men ruled by their caprices, uncontrollable impulses, and reckless fits of frenzy, which paradoxically render them as human as anyone else. The abuses they committed were clearly atrocious, yet some of them were as outlandish as the characters portrayed in the film The Dictator. They sunk to depths worthy of Kafka: so incredibly absurd, they are outrageously funny.

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