This house is all that holds us together.
Having reached back to the Second World War for his previous picture, 1987's Au Revoir les Enfants, Louis Malle took on more recent history with 1990's May Fools, which is set during the protests, strikes, and general unrest that spread like a cancer from Paris to the rest of France in May of 1968. That's the backdrop for a few days of familial infighting when the matriarch of the Vieuzac family, owner of a run-down country estate, dies and all her living relatives descend upon it -- all except for her son Milou (Michel Piccoli), who's lived there the whole time. Even before they can get her buried, Milou's daughter Camille (Miou-Miou), brother Georges (Michel Duchaussoy), and niece Claire (Dominique Blanc) set about dividing up her furniture and other possessions. And then the bomb drops that they have to give an equal share to her longtime housekeeper Adele (Martine Gautier), a last-minute addition to the old woman's will that throws them all for a loop.
Working for what turned out to be the last time with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, Malle fashioned a leisurely hangout film about a group of people who'd rather not spend a lot of time together. Furthermore, everybody -- young and old, married or not -- spends so much time falling in and out of each other's arms, there's no mistaking this for anything other than a French film. (Malle's last two -- 1992's Damage and 1994's Vanya on 42nd Street -- were made in the UK and the US, respectively.) Things ultimately take a turn for the overtly farcical when, believing that as landowners they'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes knocking at their door, the family flees into the woods, woefully unprepared for roughing it. To borrow a line from the Bard, what fools these bourgeois be.