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A Little Something Extra opens with social workers Alice, Marc and Céline taking their group to a summer camp for intellectually disabled adults.
From the first joke – one of the campers Marie gets accidentally whacked on the head, but don’t worry, she’s used to it – we’re aware that A Little Something Extra isn’t scared to go there.
And it gets away with it because the film knows the difference between laughing at these people and enjoying their company.
Star, writer and director of A Little Something Extra is Artus, a kind of Gallic Taika Waititi, while co-star Clovis Corillac is a household name there – if not here – for playing Asterix the Gaul.
They play incompetent jewellery shop robbers Paulo, nice but dim, and Lucien, bad-tempered and impatient.
The robbers escape the cops by getting a lift on the campers’ holiday bus, claiming to be a late-comer called Sylvain, with his minder. So, Alice takes them at face value.
Review: A Little Something Extra At The Movies
Now the question is, can they get away with it? More to the point, can the film get away with an hour and a half of jokes about people with disabilities, in an age when most jokes have to be very carefully vetted.
Things don’t look promising when Paulo, now Sylvain, first tries out his “special needs” voice.
But the secret of A Little Something Extra’s success – it’s one of the highest-grossing films of all time in France – is the fact that it’s taken mostly from the point of view of the holidaymakers, all played by people from the disabled community.
And all funny – funny and nicely differentiated. There’s the football fan, the flirty one, the one with no filter and the enthusiastically sweary Ludovic.
It’s a twist on the old “going undercover” plot – how long before Lucien and Paulo get found out?
Except that here, everyone pretty much knew they were fakes from the start – well, not the social workers, but everyone else. They just went along with it to see what happens next.
And A little Something Extra makes the point that disability is a spectrum anyway. Paulo and Lucien find themselves regularly outsmarted by various members of the gang, and even the three social workers have their little foibles.
Marc will believe anything he’s told, while Céline can always be depended on to take things too far. Even the lovely Alice has her failings – like her terrible taste in men, for instance.
This may be good news for Paulo, who’s smitten by her. Though even he suspects Alice won’t be impressed when he reveals he’s not in fact a lovable disabled person, but instead an unsuccessful robber.
The obvious comparison for A little Something Extra is with the Farrelly Brothers and their often confronting comedies about sensitive subjects – Dumb and Dumber , Stuck on You , There’s Something About Mary and so on.
But this is sweeter, smarter, less violent – apart from the regular mishaps suffered by the accident-prone Marie – and, for me at any rate, far funnier.
Review: A Little Something Extra At The Movies
