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Loved Colombo? Liked The Odd Couple? Crazy about La cage aux folles? Curious about how the French really live? It’s all here for you.

Got home very late from a late shift last night and chilled out by watching the final half-hour of a French detective movie called Pile ou face, which translates as Heads or Tails, from way way back in 1980, which is available on the wonderful free French app that is TV5 Monde. It has been a while since I saw a film where the interaction between the two leads was so satisfying and, just as importantly, so hilariously funny, that I feel a great need to share it with the world today as it goes through a particularly grim time.

To be honest, though, International Women’s Day is an odd date to pick for posting about a movie which looks at two lonely blokes getting old after the deaths of their wives.

Colombo, you say? Well in the sense that, as in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, we know whodunnit from the outset but the detective (Philippe Noiret) needs to establish why, as well as getting the killer (Michel Serrault) to confess just when the rest of the justice system is happy to let him go.

There are nice plot twists and some very enjoyable coups de théatre – such as the scene with the detective’s daughter towards the scene with its jokes about Gone With The Wind – but you are really here for the chemistry between Noiret’s cynical bear of a detective and Serrault’s emancipated everyman. Never were cat and mouse so nicely matched.

Whatever flaws the film may have – there are low-budget special effects and a weak sub-plot about gangsters and gilded youth – should be overlooked to get to the scenes where these two greats of French cinema eye each other up. Perhaps my favourite moment is when Serrault flicks his cigarette away in a gesture of mini fist bump triumph or kicks a football for some kids.

But Colombo? Okay, ultimately it cannot quite be Colombo when you get lines as cynical as: “Justice is like the Virgin Mary. If she doesn’t appear from time to time, you start to have doubts.”