Le Viager

French black comedy Le Viager dates from 1972 and was directed by Pierre Tchernia. It is built on the viager, an arrangement in which a property is bought for a lifetime annuity paid as long as the seller lives. The film pushes that idea to an extreme: a family buying a charming house on the Côte d'Azur is crushed by the payments because the seller will not die. It runs about 101 minutes and drew over two million viewers in France.

The story stretches from the 1930s to the 1970s. Michel Serrault plays the annuitant Martinet, and the buyers are the greedy, unpleasant Galipeau family, played by Michel Galabru, Rosy Varte, Jean-Pierre Darras, Odette Laure and Claude Brasseur. Bernard Lavalette and Paul Bisciglia are also in the cast. As the endless payments wear them down, the family resolves to hasten the seller's death. The writer thereby lampoons a practice he found immoral and mocks twentieth-century French history.

Tchernia wrote the script with René Goscinny, the creator of Asterix; it was the pair's first feature for the cinema. Shooting took place in summer 1971 in Saint-Tropez and La Garde-Freinet, then in Paris and at the Billancourt studios. The film introduced Serrault to critics and the wider public, and the partnership continued with Les Gaspards (1974).