THE ARISTOCRATS is the joke that every stand-up comic has heard told at least a dozen times.  Those not in the business will probably not know about the existence of such a thing.  Yet though the gag has been around for generations, no one can remember how it all began.  But it is the filthiest most offensive joke ever – and proof that it is not the joke that counts but the how it is told.  The structure of that joke is the premise of the new documentary THE ARISTOCRATS.

Marie (Cecile de France) and Alex (Maiwenn Le Besco), college students, holiday at Alex’s parents country home.  The countryside in France replaces the scary backwoods found in typical horror flicks like THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES where killer hicks hack up teenagers.

Now I am not technically a homosexual. I have loved women and their vaginas, proudly, for over 25 years now. But every time I see Burt Reynolds, my first instinct is that I want to make hot, passionate, sweaty gay-porn-level love to him. Then, I come to my hetero-senses and realize that I’d really just like to be his best friend, his pupil and his gopher. Kind of like a Smithers/Mr. Burns relationship.

I was fully prepared to loathe this. After the likes of SHARK TALE, ROBOTS and the enormously overrated SHREK films, I have a real hate-on for CGI animated kid’s fare. Using stock characters, badly designed dismorphic artwork and usually, a hyper-intense ***censored*** crunk reworking of a “Walking on Sunshine”-type song that features Christina Aguilera and Lil Jon trading verses over the credits as the pumping bass deafen children’s precious still-developing hearing as they leave the theater.

Summer at the summer house at the Cote D’Azur!  Marc (Gilbert Melki) and wife Beatrix (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) are holidaying with their grown up kids, Charly (Romain Torres) and Laura (Sabrina Seyvecou).  Laura takes off with a biker (Sebastien Cormier) while Charly’s buddy Martin (Edouard Collin) arrives.  Parents suspect Charly of being gay, Beatrix’s lover, Mathieu (Jacques Bonnaffe) arrives and so does Marc’s, Didier (Jean-Marc Barr) who happens to be a male.  With lots of running about, in and out of the cottage in the night and day, and with the (literally) slamming and the opening of doors, CRUSTACES ET COQUILLAGES (COCKLES AND MUSSELS or the original title COTE D’AZUR) is the typical bedroom farce the French and English do so well.