Tonight, TF1 is broadcasting the comedy Nothing to Declare, in which Dany Boon allows himself a nod to the career of his playmate Benoît Poelvoorde.
Nothing to Declare is the first feature film directed by Dany Boon after the release of Welcome to the Ch’tis! Suffice to say that this new comedy was eagerly awaited by the public.
As in Les Ch’tis, which pitted an inhabitant of the south of France against an inhabitant of the north, Nothing to Declare confronts two visions: that of a Francophobic Belgian customs officer and his more tolerant colleague (secretly in love with sister of the Belgian). Both roles are provided by Boon for the Frenchman and Benoît Poelvoorde for the Belgian.
During the film, drug traffickers try to cross the border between Belgium and France. In the last third of the film, the smuggler, Tiburce, is arrested by the two policemen played by Boon and Poelvoorde:
Pathe Tiburce, the drug courier (played by Bruno Lochet)
When captured by the police, Tiburce told the police:
No thank you, I don’t want to end up at the bottom of a canal.
This line is a nod to the one already heard in It happened near you, in which the professional killer Ben (played by Poelvoorde) explains that to get rid of a body in a canal, it must be ballasted with “three times its weight”. Otherwise, the corpse “inflates with air and tends to rise to the surface”.
Artists Anonymous
Ben Dumps a Corpse Down the Canal in “It Happened Near You”
Throughout the film, Ben eliminates an impressive number of bodies with this method and it is one of the highlights of the film. Dany Boon has therefore placed in his dialogues a reference to his comrade Poelvoorde who plays the xenophobic Belgian police officer Ruben.
But Boon also allowed himself to give roles to faces well known to the public such as Bruno Moynot, Jérôme Commandeur, Zinedine Soualem, Olivier Gourmet, Bouli Lanners, Laurent Gamelon and of course Karin Viard and François Damiens.