La Cage aux Folles II

La Cage aux Folles II
Directed by Édouard Molinaro
Written by Jean Poiret
Francis Veber
Marcello Danon
Starring Michel Serrault
Ugo Tognazzi
Marcel Bozzuffi
Music by Ennio Morricone
Release date(s) 1980 (1980)

La Cage aux Folles II is a French-Italian film released in 1980. It is a sequel to 1979's La Cage aux Folles. It is directed by Édouard Molinaro and stars Michel Serrault as Albin, (stage name ZaZa), the female impersonator star of a gay night-club revue, and Ugo Tognazzi as Renato, his mate of over twenty years.

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Synopsis

The film has a comedy-thriller plot. A spy plants a capsule of microfilm on Albin and from then on spies and government agents pursue him. Albin and Renato travel to Italy to hide at Renato's mother's farm. At each point along the way we see the straight world's reaction to Albin.

Critical response

The film was reviewed, favourably, by the critic Pauline Kael in The New Yorker: " La Cage aux Folles II has nothing to do with the art of movies, but it has a great deal to do with the craft and art of acting, and the pleasures of farce. Serrault gives a superb comic performance - his Albin is a wildly fanciful creation. There's a grandeur about Albin's inability to see himself as he is. And maybe its only in this exaggerated form that a movie about the ridiculousness and the tenderness of married love can be widely accepted now. At the end, after Albin has been kidnapped by the spies, Renato, who is nearby with the police, can't think of anything but his beloved Albin. And, suddenly, forgetting the danger, each starts running toward the other, and they meet between the two armed groups like lovers in an opera. One of the policemen watching their embrace is weeping. "It's beautiful," he says." [1]

Cast

References

  1. ^ Pauline Kael, Taking It All In, p.167 ISBN 0-7145-2841-2

External links