Three Men and a Cradle (French: Trois hommes et un couffin) is a 1985 French comedy film directed by Coline Serreau.
Pierre (Roland Giraud), Michel (Michel Boujenah), and Jacques (André Dussollier) are three swinging bachleors who are roommates sharing an upscale apartment in Paris. Jacques, who is a flight attendant, is heading off on a flight to Thailand and a vacation. He has a package he's expecting, so he tells Pierre to receive it and give it to the people who will be coming for it in a couple of days. Pierre carelessly agrees to this seemingly routine request and so is startled when he and Michel receive not an ordinary package, but a cradle, bearing Jacques' heretofore unknown infant daughter, Marie. It seems that some fifteen months ago Jacques had a fling with a model named Sylvia, Marie is the result, and Sylvia is going to the USA for modeling work so she has dropped off the child with the father who didn't even know about it.
Pierre and Michel, caught by surprise, scramble to figure out how to do routine stuff like changing diapers and getting baby formula. They are so busy that Michel barely notices when he receives a second package, the package that Jacques was actually expecting: a pack of heroin.
This film spawned several Foreign Remakes. One of them, Three Men and a Baby, became a monster box-office hit in the United States.
Tropes:
- The Casanova: All three of the men like to chase after women and sometimes they succeed, but Jacques in particular is constantly bedding babes, and in fact works as a flight attendant partially in order to meet women around the world. It catches up to him.
- The Diaper Change: Pierre bumbles his way through buying diapers, caught short when the lady at the pharmacist's asks how old the baby is and he doesn't know. The diapers he buys are far too large leaving little Marie wearing a diaper up to her armpits. Later, Michel uses diaper-changing to successfully hand off a package of heroin while the cops are watching.
- Doorstop Baby: Hilarity Ensues when Pierre opens the door and finds an infant in a cradle. He and Michel have to wildly scramble to learn basic stuff like preparing formula and chaging diapers.
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Michel does this when Pierre finds the other package lying forgotten on the couch and starts grilling Michel about when and how he got it, and Michel realizes while he's talking that the second package was what the two men wanted.
- Face Framed in Shadow: Jacques is framed this way, establishing a melancholy mood, when he stops by Sylvia's apartment and finds her gone, an indifferent med student looking after the baby.
- Foreshadowing: In one scene, Jacques goes over to Sylvia's apartment late at night and finds a babysitter who is studying his med school textbooks and thus is letting Marie stay up very late rather that struggle with Getting the Baby to Sleep. In another, Michel enters an office building to find little Marie sitting unattended in her cradle in the foyer; Sylvia had a meeting with some fashion people so she just left the baby there. These hints that Sylvia is herself overburdened with parenting pay off with the Happy Ending, when a hollow-eyed, sleep-deprived Sylvia takes Marie back to the three men and asks if they can look after her for a while.
- Getting the Baby to Sleep: A frequent challenge. Jacques has a hot date over for sex, but she winds up leaving when he goes to attend to Marie, and the date sees all three roommates bent over the cradle singing a lullaby.
- Gilligan Cut: When Jacques gets back to Paris and is greeted with the surprise baby, Pierre and Michel demand that he ask to be grounded so that he can do his share of the babysitting. Jacques categorically refuses. Cut to him leaving the HR office at work and telling a coworker that he's asked to be grounded.
- Hidden in Plain Sight: Michel hides the heroin in Marie's diaper. Neither the cops nor the gangsters find it when they search the place, and Michel later succeeds in passing the heroin to the gangsters, and thus avoiding being either arrested or murdered, by taking Marie on a stroll in the park and throwing her diaper and the heroin in a garbage can.
- Incredibly Obvious Tail: The vice cops following Pierre and Michel around are not at all subtle.
- Interrupted Intimacy: Jacques is in bed with yet another babe when the sound of Marie crying causes him to get out of bed and check on her. Eventually his date loses the mood and leaves the apartment.
- Malicious Misnaming: Jacques has found a live-in nanny, Mme. Repons, to take care of Marie. By this time however Pierre has bonded with the child and doesn't want to surrender her care. So in the course of a single hostile conversation he calls her Parons, Ronpas, Purons, and Napons. Eventually an outraged Mme. Repons stalks out.
- Mistaken for Gay: The beat cop who first becomes suspicious of Pierre goes "Oh, I see" when he finds out that Pierre and Michel are living together and have a baby.
- Oh, Crap!: Pierre gets off a pretty good Oh, Crap! reaction when he opens a door expecting a routine package and instead finds a baby. He has another one a few days later, when he sees the other package on the couch and realizes that the two rather shifty-looking men who came to the room actually wanted that package, not the child.
- Playboy Has a Daughter: Jacques is pretty surprised. When he finds out he says that there's no way he's going to stop bringing women home. In fact, this trope basically applies to all three of the protagonists who have to stop chasing women when they wind up taking care of an infant.
- Rule of Three: It wouldn't work with four men, would it?
- Shameful Strip: Pierre and Michel get suspected of drug smuggling (which they in fact are doing), so their roommate Jacques gets pulled over by customs and stripped while the cops search him and his stuff.
- Sleep Cute: The bonding between little Marie and her new fathers is shown in one shot where Michel feeds her at night and they both fall asleep together with her still in his arms.
