General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Brice de Nice

Brice de Nice is a 2005 French comedy film directed by James Huth, written by Huth with Jean Dujardin and Karine Angeli, and starring Dujardin as Brice Agostini, a nearly thirty-year-old self-styled surfer who has never surfed a wave. The film was granted French censorship visa no. 109670 on 4 March 2005 with a "Tous publics" (all audiences) rating and a stated running time of 100 minutes, and it opened in French theaters on 6 April 2005.¹ It was one of the biggest French box-office successes of its year and made catchphrases such as "J't'ai cassé!" ("I got you!") and "Ça farte?" part of everyday speech among French schoolchildren.²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	James Huth; screenplay by Jean Dujardin, Karine Angeli, and James Huth, from a character created by Dujardin³
French release	6 April 2005, on about 400 screens; visa dated 4 March 2005, 100 min¹^•⁴
Lead cast	Jean Dujardin (Brice Agostini), Clovis Cornillac (Marius Lacaille), Élodie Bouchez (Jeanne), Bruno Salomone (Igor), Alexandra Lamy (the mermaid)⁵
France admissions	4,341,092 over its 2005 run; a separate tally gives 4,424,136⁶^•⁷
Budget	€5,340,000 per AlloCiné; The Numbers lists a production budget of $6,100,000⁸^•³
Production	Mandarin Films and M6 Films; producers Éric and Nicolas Altmayer; music by Bruno Coulais³
Sequel	Brice 3, directed by James Huth, released 19 October 2016⁹

Spoilers

Plot and character

Brice is an eternal adolescent of almost thirty, neglected by a scheming father and an absent mother, who lives in the family villa in Nice and has built an identity around a "style": he is a surfer, a "winner, with a snowboarding ascendant." Like Bodhi, Patrick Swayze's character in Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break, his cult film, he waits every morning for his wave, "his" wave, on a flat Mediterranean sea that offers none.⁸ What protects him from mockery is his verbal aggression: he specializes in "casser" ("breaking") everyone around him with cutting comebacks.⁸

The plot turns when his father is sent to prison for money laundering and Brice loses his comfortable life. Seeing an announcement for a surfing competition with a $100,000 prize, he leaves Nice for the Basque coast.¹⁰ In the press kit, Dujardin described the journey as an initiatory trip: for the film to move forward, Brice had to leave Nice and, symbolically, his mother, the sea.¹¹

Cultural footprint and sequels

The film's language entered playground French: "J't'ai cassé!" and "Ça farte?" were repeated by a generation of schoolchildren, and an academic study of Mediterranean settings in French cinema compares Brice's impact on young audiences to that of Luc Besson's Le grand bleu in the late 1980s.² The character's reach extended beyond cinema: a 2012 letter in Le Monde used a "Brice de Nice strategy" as shorthand for aggressive, substance-free political communication during the UMP's primary campaign.¹⁶

A sequel followed eleven years later. Brice 3, subtitled "...parce que le 2, je l'ai cassé!" ("because I broke number 2!"), was directed by James Huth and released on 19 October 2016, with Brice living in a Nice beach hut with his goldfish Fabrice before a message in a bottle from his friend Marius sends him off again. It sold about 1,949,000 tickets, roughly two million fewer than the original, on a budget about €10 million higher, and was considered a box-office disappointment.⁹^•⁷ For the film's twentieth anniversary, the distributor SND re-released Brice de Nice in a restored version in French theaters on 9 April 2025.⁷^•⁸

Origin of the character

The character predates the film by a decade. Jean Dujardin created Brice in 1995, combining a real schoolmate, a blond classmate from his final year of high school who amused himself by "breaking" everyone, with the surfers he observed growing up in the Médoc region. The costume was assembled deliberately: a blond wig, a fake shark tooth on a cord (in fact a small goat horn), and a tight yellow T-shirt bought in a women's clothing store, with the first name printed in the Nike typeface by a friend from art school.¹¹^•¹²

Brice first lived on stage and then on television. Dujardin performed the character in sketches on M6's Graines de star, a talent show he won three times in the comedian category, and in sketches broadcast on France 2 with the troupe "Nous C Nous"; the sketches established the ritual of the "casse," in which Brice mocks his interlocutor, confirms his confusion, and slashes the air with the edge of his hand while shouting "J't'ai cassé!"¹³ When Dujardin left the character behind to play Loulou in the France 2 series Un gars, une fille (1999–2003), the sketches circulated on the early internet, and twelve-year-olds were calling him Brice in the street even though the sketches had long left the air.¹³^•¹¹

For the film, Dujardin reunited his sketches and brought in the screenwriter Karine Angeli, who wrote for Un gars, une fille, to give the character a story; James Huth joined after six months of writing. Dujardin also prepared physically for five months, six hours a week with a coach, to make the surfer physique credible.¹¹^•¹²

Reception and box office

The film opened on about 400 French screens on 6 April 2005 and drew 1,346,829 admissions in its first week, reaching a cumulative 4,341,092 by mid-July 2005 according to AlloCiné's weekly figures; CinéDweller's tally gives 4,424,136 admissions including Paris and the surrounding area.⁴^•⁶^•⁷ CinéDweller ranks it as the fourth-biggest success of the French year in 2005, behind Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Star Wars: Episode III, and The Chronicles of Narnia, and the only French production in that year's top ten.⁷ The Numbers records an international (and worldwide) box office of $34,631,405 against a production budget it lists at $6,100,000, about 5.7 times the budget.³ A press dossier from Dujardin's later career describes the film as the most successful French film of 2005.¹⁴

Critical reception was far cooler than the popular one. AlloCiné's normalized press score is 2.8 out of 5 across 20 reviews, while its spectator score is 1.9 out of 5 from about 50,000 ratings.⁸ Première compared Dujardin to Jim Carrey and called the film an open-bar festival of gags; Rolling Stone noted that the flood of jokes had at least been channeled into a linear story.¹⁵ Others were harsher: Cahiers du Cinéma wrote that the trailer was better than the film it promised, Télérama called it the most dispiriting film made in a long while while singling out Clovis Cornillac's performance, and Le Monde's critic saw in it an image of contemporary puerile frivolity, softened by the need to give a sketch figure a ninety-minute story.¹⁵ On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has no Tomatometer reviews and a 50 percent audience score from more than 2,500 ratings.⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2005 to 2006

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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