Cocorico (2024)

In southern France, François Martin and Alice Bouvier-Sauvage are about to announce their marriage to their respective families. A world separates them: Gérard, François’s father, is a Peugeot car dealer, and his mother, Nicole, is a homemaker, while Frédéric and Catherine, Alice’s parents, inherited a château in the middle of a vast wine estate in the Bordeaux region. Frédéric does not take the marriage announcement well. He believes the Bouvier-Sauvages, descendants of French aristocrats since the Middle Ages, must preserve their status and not marry just anyone. To ease the tension, the engaged couple give their parents the results of DNA tests they had done by the American laboratory where Alice works. They have not looked at the results themselves, so they can keep the surprise. Gérard opens his envelope first and discovers that he is 50% German, a shock because he had always believed he was purely French. Catherine is also shocked to learn that she has Portuguese ancestry, when she had always believed she descended from a noble Italian family. Nicole is the happiest: she discovers she has English ancestry and is a distant relative of the Sussexes. Frédéric cries out with joy when he discovers that he is indeed French, but his delight fades when he learns that he has 15% Cherokee ancestry. Each of them comes to terms with these revelations: Gérard has it out with his father, who admits that he hid being German to avoid being viewed negatively after the war. Nicole tries to learn English and the ways of the British monarchy. Catherine learns Portuguese, while Frédéric investigates because he does not believe the test result. He discovers the truth: his great-grandmother had an affair outside her marriage with one of the Native Americans in Buffalo Bill’s troupe, which was passing through France at the beginning of the [century unspecified]. Falling into depression, Frédéric, drunk, attacks a Buffalo Steak grill restaurant “to save the bison.” Meanwhile, Gérard accepts his German roots and buys a Mercedes, then goes with Nicole to the British Embassy in France. Unfortunately for her, although she is connected to the English king Richard the Lionheart through her ancestor Philippe de Cognac, her forebear left her nothing. The Martins and the Bouvier-Sauvages eventually reconcile and accept the marriage when they learn that Alice is pregnant. The film ends during the baptism party for Alice and François’s son, when Alice tells François that the lab made a mistake in his father’s results: he is indeed 15% Cherokee, but it was the remaining 85% that the lab got wrong—his father is not of French origin.