General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Les Visiteurs

Les Visiteurs (English: The Visitors) is a 1993 French fantasy comedy directed by Jean-Marie Poiré, in which a 12th-century knight and his squire are accidentally transported to contemporary France by a wizard's flawed potion. Written by Poiré and Christian Clavier, it stars Clavier as Jacquouille la Fripouille, Jean Reno as Godefroy de Montmirail, and Valérie Lemercier in a double role. With 13.7 million admissions in France, it became one of the most successful French films ever released and spawned a sequel, an American remake, and a third installment.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	27 January 1993 (France); 106 minutes; comedy with fantasy and time-travel elements¹^•³
Director and writers	Jean-Marie Poiré; screenplay and dialogue by Poiré and Christian Clavier, from an original idea by Poiré²
Main cast	Christian Clavier (Jacquouille la Fripouille), Jean Reno (Godefroy de Papincourt, Count of Montmirail), Valérie Lemercier (Frénégonde / Béatrice)²
French box office	13,728,242 admissions at the end of its first run; second-biggest French film behind La Grande Vadrouille²^•⁴
Awards	One César from nine nominations at the 1994 ceremony: Best Supporting Actress for Valérie Lemercier⁵
Music	Original score by Eric Lévi¹
Franchise	Sequel Les Visiteurs 2: Les Couloirs du temps (1998, over 8 million admissions); American remake Just Visiting (2001); third film Les Visiteurs: La Révolution (2016)⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot and characters

The story opens in the year 1123. Count Godefroy de Montmirail, a 12th-century nobleman returning from foreign wars, falls under a witch's curse and, hallucinating, mistakes his future father-in-law for a bear and kills him with an arrow.⁸^•⁹ To undo the fatal act, he and his squire Jacquouille la Fripouille drink a potion prepared by the wizard Eusæbius that is meant to send Godefroy back in time a few moments. Instead, the pair are hurled forward to the year 1992.⁹

In the present, the two medieval visitors find that Godefroy's castle has become an upmarket château-restaurant owned by Jacques-Henri Jacquart, a descendant of Jacquouille, while Béatrice, Godefroy's distant descendant, lives in a small house nearby and is also played by Valérie Lemercier, who appears as both Béatrice and her medieval ancestor Frénégonde de Pouille.⁸^•⁹^•²⁴ The comedy rests on the pair's fish-out-of-water predicament: they must cope with a baffling modern century, try to communicate in old French with the locals, and find a way home.¹ Marie-Anne Chazel plays Ginette, a homeless woman, and the supporting cast includes Christian Bujeau, Isabelle Nanty, Didier Pain as King Louis VI, and Pierre Vial as the wizard.²

Sequels

Poiré had conceived a second installment while writing the first film, but the financiers, already uneasy about the subject, declined to commit to it at the time.⁶ Les Visiteurs 2: Les Couloirs du temps was eventually released in 1998 with a spectacle-scale budget and elaborate gag set pieces, but without Valérie Lemercier. It drew more than 8 million admissions and was the second-biggest French success of its year, edged out at the finish by Le Dîner de Cons.⁶ A third film, Les Visiteurs: La Révolution, followed in 2016, reuniting Clavier and Reno with new cast members including Franck Dubosc, Sylvie Testud, Alex Lutz, and Karin Viard; it was poorly received by critics, with an AlloCiné press average of 2.0 out of 5.²⁰

Origins of the project

The idea predates the film by decades. As a high-school student, Jean-Marie Poiré wrote a four-page short story in a notebook; years later, during a move in 1990, he rediscovered it and submitted the idea to his friend and co-author Christian Clavier. The two then developed the structure into the story of two medieval men stranded in the present.¹⁰^•⁴

A risky pitch. Poiré's previous comedy, L'Opération Corned-beef (1991), had succeeded largely on the strength of its cast of Clavier, Reno, and Lemercier, and the same trio reunited for Les Visiteurs two years later.¹⁰^•⁴ On the strength of that success, Poiré persuaded Gaumont to back a more ambitious film, a fantasy with visual effects and characters from the Middle Ages speaking old French. Poiré's own account describes it as a risky project that only he and Clavier believed in, which became an extraordinary triumph.⁶ The film was produced by Alain Terzian through Alter Films, in co-production with Gaumont, France 3 Cinéma, Clavier's Alpilles Productions, and Poiré's Amigo Productions.²

Box office and reception

The film was a historic commercial success. By July 1993 Le Monde reported more than two million admissions in the Paris region and 8,709,411 entries in the 416 French screens then showing it, a pace unmatched in France since Trois hommes et un couffin in 1985.¹¹ It finished its first theatrical run with 13,728,242 admissions, a figure later revised downward by about 100,000 in a 2008 re-evaluation of CNC data, and it ranked second among French films behind only La Grande Vadrouille (1966), which had drawn 17.2 million.²^•¹²^•⁴^•¹¹ A French Senate report credited the film with drawing nearly 14 million spectators, placing it seventh among all films released in France since 1956 by cumulative admissions.¹³

Critical response was more reserved than the public's. AlloCiné's press aggregate gives the film an average of 3.2 out of 5 across five reviews; Cahiers du Cinéma judged that the film met the challenge of its premise despite some miscalibrations, while Télérama found it pleasant but disposable.¹⁴ At the 1994 César ceremony the film received nine nominations, including Best Film and Best Director, and won one award, Best Supporting Actress for Valérie Lemercier's double performance.⁵^•⁹ On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.0/10 from about 42,000 users.¹⁵

International release and remake

The film traveled well abroad. Miramax released it in the United States on July 12, 1996, where it earned $659,810; Mel Brooks was hired to write and record English-language dialogue for that release.¹⁶^•¹⁷

In 1994 the American producer and screenwriter John Hughes bought the remake rights and invited Poiré and Clavier to Chicago to work on the Hollywood version's screenplay.⁶ The result, Just Visiting (2001), was directed by Poiré with Reno and Clavier reprising their roles as Count Thibault and André, joined by Christina Applegate, Tara Reid, and Matt Ross; the story moves the action to Chicago. It grossed $4.8 million in the United States and received a Metascore of 38, with critics' consensus calling it a middling effort inferior to the original.⁷^•¹⁸ In France the film, released as Les Visiteurs en Amérique, drew 1.2 million spectators.¹⁹

Legacy

The film's standing in French popular cinema rests on its audience numbers and its afterlife in quotations and television reruns. Its first free-to-air broadcast, on France 3 in April 1996, drew 11.3 million viewers, and the film has since accumulated thirteen prime-time broadcasts on French channels.²¹ Le Monde places it among the works carrying the comic tradition of the Splendid troupe, the Paris theater collective from which Clavier emerged, and the CNC's all-time admissions ranking lists it thirteenth among films released in France.²²^•²³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Science fiction and fantasy films (individual works) › Science fiction and fantasy films of the 1990s › Released 1990 to 1995

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

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