Trois hommes et un couffin

(1985)

   Film. Coline Serreau's comedy Trois hommes et un couffin narrates the story of three bachelors whose lives are changed when a baby girl is left at their apartment. The men, Pierre (Roland Giraud), Michel (Michel Boujenah), and Jacques (André Dussolier), have previously vowed not to allow women to inhabit their space for more than one night. Through their care for the infant, however, they find a space for women, or at least girls, in their lives and discover that they can be loving, capable fathers.

   The film, which questions received gender roles, was an enormous success, despite Serreau's initial struggles to locate a producer. It was the best-selling film in France in 1985 and the fifth most commercially successful French film at the box office in the latter half of the twentieth century. It won César Awards for Best Film and Best Screenplay, and Boujenah, a little-known actor at the time, won the César for Best Supporting Actor. Trois hommes et un couffin was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Serreau was expected to direct the Hollywood remake of the film, Three Men and a Baby, but dropped out of the project, leaving the remake to director Leonard Nimoy. Serreau has since made rather scathing remarks about what she sees as Hollywood's stifling influence on directors.

   Serreau was one of several French women directors to emerge in the 1970s. Although there were prominent women directors before her, she came of age during a time when women were not expected to be directors, and thus her interest in challenging preassigned gender roles is not surprising. In Trois hommes et un couffin, men take on roles that have traditionally been assigned to women and eventually embrace their capacity as caregivers. Serreau's Pourquoi pas! (1977), made in the previous decade, also challenged conventional gender roles.

   Historical Dictionary of French Cinema by Dayna Oscherwitz & Mary Ellen Higgins