I do not think this French film could have been made in NZ. I am sure the idea or a completed film script would have been kicked out of the sponsor room with no more free lunches for either the writer or director. Why? The audience are asked to laugh for around two hours at the mental and physical mishaps and bizarre behaviour of a group of permanent disabled young people at a summer holiday camp.
The group disabilities are wide ranging and include needing toilet care, help with showering, going to bed and dressing. People get hit in the face, one person gets lost lost and ….I could go on and on. It is satire. Disability language is satirised. I heard the word “handicapped” and the word “spazz”. Now, do you know what “spazz”means? I do. I am now going back a long way to when I was a young Primary School teacher watching a small boy of seven clowning around with friends, making bizarre gestures and movements, rolling his eyes and screaming, “I’m a spazz, I’m a spazz”. He meant he was impersonating an individual suffering from spastic paralysis. The little boy didn’t get far with his game. His mother dealt with him, his father did too and the teachers dealt with the issue in class.
To add a NZ element to this French satire I noticed that many in the cinema audience including my partner and myself were all in the “disability” zone. The use of “walkers ” “walking sticks” and extreme slowness of movement was obvious in the audience going to their seats. The film started. I started laughing and heard others doing the same. Why am I going on like this? Because I think this film satirising people with disabilities is one of the finest films I have seen in a long time.
As I left the cinema, I began to recall a conversation with my BBC French journalism friend, Francois. One night over coffee, food, wine and the sound of the melancholic voice of singer Edith Piaf, we had discussed political correctness in creativity. Are some topics off-limits? Francois convinced me that there are no off-limit topics and political correctness should be ignored and/or exposed or both. After a long night we agreed that any topic or theme is valid, it depends how the artiste works with the material! That evening has remained with me for around half of my life. I wish it had taken place in my youth.
A Little Something Extra (Un P’tit Truc en Plus) has a cast of three professional comedians and the rest of the large cast are played by non-professional young actors with various disabilities. The Director of the film, Artus, re-wrote the script after casting it to adapt the fictional characters to their real-life counterparts. The plot begins as two jewel thieves, a father and son jump on the bus and the son pretends to be disabled. I have no idea how the film came together in such a joyful way.
As the show ended I thought that the overall production shows respect, understanding of some of the needs for people living with disabilities that go beyond bread, butter and daily routines. Bravo. And thank you too, Francois.