Nicky Larson and the Cupid's Perfume

Nicky Larson is a walking cliché: the self-absorbed private detective only has women on his mind - and in his eyes - all day long, whether he's playing sport, showering, using the scope on his sniper rifle or simply collecting underwear in the park. He is not successful with his scam. His flatmate Laura, the sister of Nicky's murdered ex-partner, is all the more annoyed. A delicate assignment leads to further sexually amorous developments: A criminal syndicate is on the hunt for a new kind of love tincture called "Cupid's Perfume", which makes the person inhaling it fall in love (and become submissive) within seconds. The only problem is that the suitcase with the explosive contents has been mixed up with the briefcase of a civilian during the handover - and the latter is now on his way to meet his adored lingerie model Jessica Fox (Pamela Anderson) in Monaco. The bestselling Japanese manga series by Tsukasa Hojo established the exaggerated fictional character "Nicky Larson" in 1985: an overbearing "womanizer" with a penchant for drooling facial derailment who, thanks to his powerful colleague Laura, gets a lot of flack for his obvious weaknesses. Nicky Larson is a "nympho", a sex maniac, sometimes even a stalker - and is branded and ridiculed with this misbehavior. Director, lead actor and co-writer Philippe Lacheau and his partner Élodie Fontan (in the role of Laura) clearly show that adapting the manga was a matter close to their hearts. Lacheau is not very well known in Germany. In his native France, his films such as "Superhero against his will" and "Alibi.com" became box office hits with their mixture of action and coarse, silly humor. With his well-rehearsed companions, the comedy troupe La Bande à Fifi, we can once again expect all kinds of humor that literally "goes below the belt", but sticks to the exaggerations of the original with the courage to be ugly. "Nicky Larson is an archetype from the 1980s that completely conforms to this idea of a dominant, masculine man who craves heterosexual sex, and the fact that he falls madly in love with another man completely challenges this system of thinking: is it bad to fall in love with this character? Yes, because there is no consent, and not because it is homosexual love. The film is an exaggerated work, and the gags that rain down around this bromance are there precisely to enlarge the picture, to parody a very heterosexualized view of homosexuality: What Nicky imagines are clichés, because he is one himself: he refuses to openly confess his love to Laura, this woman he cannot love, perhaps precisely because she is too tomboyish for his taste, a preference dictated by his imprisonment in this famous myth of masculinity, which imposes archetypes and completely well-trodden paths on him. A cross-generational cry of love to Club Dorothée, wrapped in an avalanche of allusions to the work of Tsukasa Hojo (paper or screen version), a crime comedy and buddy movie in which the two protagonists are, for once, not just men, Nicky Larson may raise some questions that seem dubious at first glance. But behind the pure entertainment lies a far more profound reflection on the codes that govern relations between the sexes and love life than it first appears." (Guillaume Labrude, in: theconversation.com)