In France, surfer film gets a goofy foot in the door

Brice bears all the trappings of the Southern California surf dude -- the sun-bleached hair, the baggy clothes, the laid-back ‘tude, the hot board -- and he’s on the eternal quest for the perfect wave. But there’s a glitch: He can’t surf, and the wave he’s waiting for is in the notoriously placid Mediterranean.

This hasn’t stopped Brice from sailing to the top of the French box office, where he’s been perched for weeks. “Brice de Nice,” directed by James Huth, was released in France on April 6 and broke all opening-day records for the year, beating out such American films as “Hitch” and “Meet the Fockers.”

Based on a character created by actor-comedian Jean Dujardin more than a decade ago, Brice may have ridden into the sunset had it not been for a bevy of high school students who -- unbeknownst to Dujardin -- created scores of websites and adopted what is known as the “Brice attitude.”

That attitude lives in a universe where everything is yellow -- from Brice’s hair to the clothes he wears to the champagne-drenched parties he throws, known as ... “yellows.”

Living in Nice and supported by his dodgy millionaire father, Brice rules the shoreline. After praying at his bedside shrine to Patrick Swayze’s character Bodhi from the movie “Point Break,” Brice selects one of his signature yellow T-shirts (emblazoned with his name and an upside-down Nike swoosh, a nod to Brice’s hapless bent) and sets out, board under arm, to await the rip curl.

The wave, of course, never comes, and so each day Brice visits his local cafe, where he “busts” everyone he meets. Busting, his favorite activity (coined as “cassage” in French for the film), essentially means coming up with witty put-downs accompanied by a precision-perfect chop of the arm. Walk down any street in Paris and it’s hard to avoid being “busted” by movie fans.

A phenomenon in France, where films geared to teenagers are a new trend, “Brice” has avoided the pitfalls of sketch characters who often fail in the leap to the big screen. A heartfelt story lies behind the yellow haze, and the wave finally does come.

-- Nancy Tartaglione,

in Paris