“Bad pick”: Gérard Jugnot (not very) inspired by the Dupont de Ligonnès affair

The film is “loosely inspired by an incredible true story”. Or the arrest of Guy Joao in October 2019, wrongly mistaken for Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès, wanted for having murdered his entire family in 2011. In “Mauvaise pioche”, his thirteenth film as director, Gérard Jugnot himself plays this man mistaken for a father suspected of having killed his wife and children. When the feature film begins, Serge Martin, bus driver, is intercepted by the police at Genoa airport (Italy). We take him for Thierry Durand de Solilès, “a psycho who massacred his family and who disappeared”.

Jugnot’s bias is twofold. It is, on the one hand, about ridiculing the police and especially the media. On the other hand, to show how Serge Martin saw his life trampled. As an explanation for this “unbelievable” police and media failure, the director gives us a sequence of facts. A cop gives (false) information to a TV presenter whom he flirts with. The presenter asks her intern to call her “date” at Agence France Presse to verify the information. And the latter extorts confirmation from the same cop in exchange for two VIP seats at the Parc des Princes.

On the 24-hour news channel, there are specialists in scalpels, weapons, immigration, violence management and unhinging doors. “Do you know that some migrants who come from Libya are cannibals? », asks one of these “experts”… This caricatured vision of the work of cops and journalists could amuse if it were not dismayingly heavy.

A shipwreck despite a golden casting

The characters are all stupid or corrupt. Except the intern, but that’s of course because she’s not really part of this environment yet. Everything is told at face value. And in case we haven’t understood the message, they explain to us: “When (journalists) have a subject to attract an audience, they don’t give up.”

“Mauvaise pioche” then shows Serge Martin trying to return to a normal life. It could have been an opportunity to pay tribute to Guy Joao, who died in 2021 following a long illness. Except that Gérard Jugnot paints the portrait of a somewhat pathetic and violent guy, whose wife left him for a driving school instructor and who begins to beat up a cop to the point of ending up in prison. The sequences behind bars then resemble a bad parody of “A Prophet”, with a series of clichés, including this blond man named Tariq Abduh who tries to circumcise himself…

Neither the flowery love sequence with Zabou Breitman, nor this final joke – “She’s a young girl. I would give him a cartridge, but not a cigarette” – fail to make us smile. Damage. Gérard Jugnot had a golden subject and a nice cast (around him, Philippe Lacheau, Thierry Lhermitte, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Michèle Laroque, Reem Kherici…). On the same theme, Jean-Christophe Meurisse signed “Les Pistolets en plastic” in 2024, a trashy and cruel comedy that was much tastier.