Every week, Netflix reveals its Top 10 lists, ranking its most-viewed movies and TV shows. Though some of these top titles are expected, others can surprise. Here’s where we try to make sense of those seemingly random hits.
France has a reputation for being sexually liberal, and a recent French film that dropped on the streamer, Honeymoon Crasher, is mining that reputation for laughs in a way that is wildly entertaining. It made me concerned that I shouldn’t be laughing as much as I did on a couple of occasions during my viewing. (I should note that I watched the film in French with subtitles, which is a better experience than watching the dubbed version.)
Honeymoon Crasher, which has been at No. 1 on Netflix’s non-English movies Top 10 list for weeks, stars Michèle Laroque as Lily, a middle-aged woman whose son Lucas (Julien Frison) was left at the altar by his fiancée, Elodie. In the aftermath, Lucas is not just depressed that he was abandoned by the woman that he loves, but he also spent a ton of money on the perfect honeymoon, and the trip is going to go to waste if he doesn’t go. And so, out of pity for his mother (she and Lucas’ father are married but never had the chance to take a honeymoon of their own), and out of a desire to make his ex jealous on socials by pretending he’s bringing a new girlfriend who doesn’t exist, he and his mom head to Mauritius for a tropical getaway.
It sounds innocent enough so far, just a mom and her adult son on a trip together. Still, the jokes start pouring in when Lily realizes that the staff and other guests think that she and Lucas are newlyweds and are impressed by their progressive May-December romance. Their suite is upgraded by the hotel manager, who sees Lily as an aspirational figure, and guests are fascinated by how Lily and Lucas met. “She was there when I was born,” Lucas tells another couple in one of the film’s funnier sequences. “She was the first person to hold me… We’ve been together ever since.” In this case, Lucas is intentionally trying to creep his own mother out as payback for taking the ruse too far, and it’s a clever way of making a joke while acknowledging how gross it all sounds.
