Posted in: Movies, Recent Updates | Tagged: charlotte gainsbourg, lynn shelton

It's Not Gay If There's No Frenching – Get Ready For A Humpday Remake

Published Thu, 08 Sep 2011 08:48:27 -0500

Last updated Thu, 08 Sep 2011 08:57:35 -0500

It's become fairly commonplace to see "foreign" films being remade in the US, so it's a little strange to now be reporting on a US film that's being remade in France.

Humpday, for those who haven't seen it, is a dramedy with mostly improvised dialogue about two friends who meet up again after a long period of leading different lives. Ben, a domesticated man with a white picket fence, and Andrew, a free-spirited wanderer, go out to a party, drink far too much and pledge to have sex on camera and submit it to a local amateur porn festival.

In the cold and sobering light of day, both friends bet that the other will be too scared to go through with it, and a drunken bet escalates into the two of them booking out a hotel room and buying a HD camera to capture them doing the deed. All they need to do now is explain the situation to Ben's wife…

The movie was directed by Lynn Shelton and stars two great improv actors – Mark Duplass of the Duplass brothers and Joshua Leonard of The Blair Witch Project – in the leading roles. It sits comfortably in my personal list of Top 10 Favourite Movies and is well worth a watch, if only to find out whether or not they "do it" at the end of the film.

Given the generally dim view I hold of remakes, I should probably regard the idea of remaking Humpday with total disgust, but I'm actually interested to see what the French make of it. The rights were sold by Magnolia Pictures earlier this year, and sales head Laird Adamson had this to say about it:

"It was always our intention to bring Humpday to the world not just as an English language film, but to also encourage other producers and distributors to adapt it in their own language … Magnolia's flexibility and unique approach to optioning the Humpday remake rights has proven to be a valuable international sales tool."

Tout Le Cine reports that the new version will star Yvan Attal and François Cluzet in the lead roles, with Charlotte Gainsbourg as Ben's wife Anna. Though they'll probably all be given French names like Jacques and Pierre and, um … Tintin? Belgium is in France, right?

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