It’s been 22 years since the dubious Puerto Rican appeared in the Coen brothers’ classic – and 46 since Les Valseuses, the French sex
comedy John Turturro has loosely adapted for Jesus’s comeback. Welcome to the world of the cinematic crossover
Long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with its characters popping up willy-nilly in one another’s adventures, there existed what might be called the World Cinema Universe. It was there when the MCU was a gleam in an accountant’s eye, and it will be with us long after Tom Holland is using a stairlift rather than climbing the walls, although entry is not restricted to those with superpowers. It is here that you will find characters crossing between separate films, sometimes in the form of a grudge match (Freddy vs Jason, Alien vs Predator, the forthcoming Godzilla vs Kong) or a genre mashup (the various Abbott and Costello Meet … horror-comedies). The same actor (Michael Keaton) might play the same cop in two movies by different directors (Jackie Brown and Out of Sight). Or one film-maker will take characters created decades earlier by a different director and speculate on what became of them, as Manoel de Oliveira did in 2006 with Belle Toujours, his reply to Luis Buñuel’s 1967 Belle de Jour.
The new road movie The Jesus Rolls is not an easy film to like but demonstrates the rich possibilities of this wider cinematic universe. The picture is a remake of Bertrand Blier’s scabrous 1974 black comedy Les Valseuses, in which a pair of hoodlums (including a young Gérard Depardieu) shag and pilfer their way across
France, mistreating and discarding women as they go. In the update, the men – played by John Turturro, who also wrote and directed, and Bobby Cannavale – are now in their 50s; a tale of feckless, thuggish youth is now one of gone-to-seed middle age. When Turturro sought permission from Blier for the men to be older, the answer came back: “OK, as long as they’re stupid.”