Le grand amour

Beloved for his inventive blend of physical humor and emotional warmth, French director-actor Pierre Etaix passed away last October at the age of eighty-seven. In the second installment of our video series Anatomy of a Gag, filmmaker and critic David Cairns celebrates the work of this comedic genius by examining one of his greatest sequences: the Buñuelian dreamscape of traveling beds in the 1969 marriage satire Le grand amour.

For more of Cairns’s takes on film comedy, check out his liner notes for our Etaix box set and his first Anatomy of a Gag video, an analysis of Jacques Tati’s PlayTime.