Name: Comédie-Française
Genre: Comedy
Released: 2026-07-22T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 75 min
Cast: Pauline Clément, Laurent Stocker, Julien Frison, Marina Hands, Adeline D’Hermy

Every backstage farce runs on the same engine: a curtain that has to go up and a company in no state to raise it. Comédie-Française bolts that engine onto the one stage in France where the rule is part of the house’s identity. At the Comédie-Française, the play is never cancelled. So when Nina, a company actor about to unveil her first staging there, watches everything else fall apart in the three hours before opening night (an actor stuck on a train, equipment breaking down, egos clashing), cancellation is the one exit she is not allowed to take.

What lifts the film above a neat premise is who is in the building. Directors Bertrand Usclat and Martin Darondeau, the pair behind the Canal+ sketch series Broute, cast members of the real troupe of the House of Molière in a fiction set inside their own workplace, and the institution co-produced the result. Pauline Clément, one of the company’s actors, co-wrote the script and plays Nina. At home the film became one of the comedies of the summer, a debut feature that held its ground against the season’s blockbusters, and it now crosses the Channel.

The casting is the argument. Laurent Stocker, Julien Frison, Marina Hands, Adeline D’Hermy and Danièle Lebrun are company actors playing company actors, Guillaume Gallienne is among the house’s best-known faces in the cast, and Éric Ruf, who was the institution’s general administrator when the cameras arrived, turns up in a cameo. That choice changes what kind of comedy this can be. A farce about an invented theatre mocks a type. A farce performed by the actual troupe on its own premises mocks a specific workplace, its hierarchy and its habits, with the people inside it in on the joke. Part of the pleasure on offer is recognition, the kind a company revue gives the company, scaled up for a national audience that mostly knows the Français by reputation.

The genre it joins is old and well furnished. Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, filmed by Peter Bogdanovich, turned the collapse of a touring production into clockwork. François Truffaut’s The Last Metro made a Paris theatre’s nightly curtain an act of survival under the Occupation. John Cassavetes’ Opening Night pushed pre-premiere nerves into breakdown, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve found the knives in the dressing room. On the evidence of its premise, Comédie-Française inherits Frayn’s clock rather than Cassavetes’ despair, and Darondeau has said the percussion behind Clément Ducol’s score came from the same instinct that drives Birdman, with the difference that Iñárritu’s film is more jazz; the musicians also bent instruments and played with the sound of the stage machinery, in the manner of Stomp. What the film updates is the weight of the setting. Truffaut’s theatre was invented. This one is often described as the oldest active theatre company in the world, and it has the bureaucracy to match.

The project began much smaller. According to the directors’ interview with France’s CNC, the spark came from Bertrand Schaaff, the house’s director of production, who suggested a few comic shorts about theatre life for social media with Clément. Usclat and Darondeau answered with something bigger, first a series and then a feature. Usclat describes an institution that employs 400 people and rests on a substantial administration, and that machinery is the film’s real antagonist. The shoot ran two weeks inside the theatre, in eight-to-five slots, six of those days on the main stage. Usclat also told the CNC that the script was written “to the bone” and that only about forty seconds were cut in the edit, which fits a running time of 75 minutes for a story that covers three hours.

There are limits to what this setup can prove. A satire co-produced by its own target is also a brand exercise, and the access that makes the film possible is the same access that files down its teeth. The house lent its stage, its actors and its administrator, and it is hard to imagine it lending them to a picture that pressed on harder questions about public subsidy, internal rank or who gets handed a first production at the Français. Nina’s situation, a young director facing a premiere the institution will not let her postpone, raises those questions. The premise suggests the film answers them with a farce’s stopwatch rather than an argument. The festival record has a similar shape. At the Alpe d’Huez comedy festival the film took four prizes, including the special jury prize and the audience award, while the Grand Prix went to Fabien Gorgeart’s C’est quoi l’amour. And a good share of the in-house comedy rests on knowing the company’s ranks and rituals, which British audiences will meet cold.

The French box office settled the commercial question. Released in France by Zinc Film and Warner Bros. France, the film finished its first week in second place behind Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey with 359,703 admissions, and it had passed 1.28 million after nine weeks. The AlloCiné press average stands at 4.1 out of 5 across 41 reviews.

An actor in a period costume peers through stage smoke in a still from Comédie-Française — An actor in costume amid stage smoke in *Comédie-Française* (2026)

Usclat and Darondeau direct from a screenplay they wrote with Pauline Clément and Clémence Dargent. Clément leads as Nina Cardi, with Laurent Stocker as Philippe Vialle, Julien Frison as Antoine de Nombel, Marina Hands as Émilie Hamel, Adeline D’Hermy as Suzanne Paturel and Danièle Lebrun as Nadine Guimard, while Christian Hecq, Serge Bagdassarian, Sefa Yeboah and Sephora Pondi fill out the backstage staff. Atelier de Production produced, with the Comédie-Française and France 2 Cinéma as co-producers, and Clément Ducol wrote the music.

Comédie-Française opens in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 9 October 2026, released by Tull Stories. It has been in French cinemas since 22 July 2026, after a world premiere at the Alpe d’Huez festival in January, and a German theatrical release is listed for 24 December 2026. No US release has been announced. The running time is 75 minutes.