As Long As You’ve Got Your Health

Pierre Étaix – 1966 – France

As Long as You’ve Got Your Health is a completely charming anthology of comedy shorts by Pierre Étaix, all of them co-written with Jean-Claude Carrière, his (and Buñuel’s) primary collaborator throughout the 60s.  Before a recent restoration and home video release by the Criterion Collection, Étaix’s films were a lost treasure of French cinema, which had the contradictory effects of both preserving and casting doubt on his reputation as a comedic genius.  I think there is little doubt now, though.  On the basis of many shorts and the features The Suitor (1962) and Yoyo (1965), Étaix is every bit the equal (if not better) of his egomaniacal American contemporary Jerry Lewis who is so beloved by the French.  His style lacks the stately meticulousness of his mentor Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958) or Play Time (1967), but it has a casual ease and common feel that makes him in many ways more accessible than Tati and infinitely less cloying than Lewis.  The film is a kaleidoscope of bits made over several years, some black-and-white and some color.  As originally released in 1966, it included four shorts made since 1962, but five years later, Étaix deleted the earliest of the segments and replaced it with a new one, so to be fair I like to regard the feature complete with all five stories.  The ruling theme is one shared by Chaplin, Tati and Lewis; the eccentric fool’s utter bafflement by the hectic absurdity of modern life.  Although the title segment, As Long as You’ve Got Your Health, is probably the most ambitious and certainly the centerpiece of the film, my personal favorite was the early short, Into the Woods No More, in which a pair of young lovers on a picnic, a weekend hunter, and a cantankerous farmer all disrupt each other’s activities by trying to adapt the environment to their own needs.