Les Chinois à Paris (1974)

Europe is on the verge of being completely overrun by the countless army of Maoist China. On television, the President of the French Republic (Bernard Blier) calls on the French people to show selflessness and a spirit of sacrifice. But immediately after his address, he boards a plane for New York with his entourage. While Parisians kill one another on the highway in a scramble to be among the first to flee, the Chinese occupying army takes over France without bloodshed. The Chinese troops have barely set up camp when government and Church officials, along with the press, come forward to offer their services. High Commissioner Pou-Yen sets up his headquarters at Galeries Lafayette. Then, from Beijing, the Central Committee appoints the Frenchman Hervé Sainfous de Montaubert (Jacques François) governor of occupied France. The occupiers set about bringing about a proletarian revolution in France, Chinese-style: one of their first measures is to abolish private cars. As part of their plan for an international division of labor, the Chinese look for work to assign to the French. They discover that the French are reputed to be the world's greatest “fumistes.” Because of a semantic confusion between the slang term fumiste and the trade of stove-and-chimney fitter, all of France ends up making stovepipes. Industrialists such as Grégoire Montclair (Michel Serrault) suddenly become zealous communists. Régis Forneret (Jean Yanne) owns a sex shop. Cynical and disillusioned, he looks for ways to profit from the situation. The strictness of the Chinese communists prompts him to turn his shop into a chop suey restaurant. But he immediately has another idea: he invents “podometers,” a rickshaw taxi service that is an enormous success from the outset. Soon he is celebrating his first billion. He is then introduced to High Commissioner Pou-Yen and persuades him to subsidize a “revolutionary opera” he wants to put on. Soon he is celebrating his second billion. He will celebrate his eighth billion after signing a contract to manufacture bulletproof vests for the Chinese army. Later, at another meeting with Pou-Yen, Forneret gets permission to turn France into a genuine symbolic showcase of decadence, supposedly as a cautionary example for the socialist world. With Chinese subsidies, he covers France with nightclubs, casinos, cabarets, and brothels. The Chinese end up joining the French in their nocturnal revels, which eventually exhausts them. One morning, they evacuate France without a fight. France is, in effect, liberated. The President of the Republic then returns from the United States. He has barely settled back in when Forneret comes to sell him all the military equipment the Chinese left behind. Forneret then leaves France for Italy, which is still under Chinese occupation, to continue his profitable business dealings. He tells Stéphanie, whom he has taken with him, that he has already resold all his rickshaws to the Pope.