The veteran French director of light comedy, Edouard Molinaro, is best known here for La Cage Aux Folles, and the star of that film, Michel Serrault, bakes a cameo appearance as Louis XV in Molinaro's new offering, about the 18th-century playwright, adventurer and gun-runner Caron de Beaumarchais. Mind you, nearly every performance is a cameo in this helter-skelter comedy, which seems intent on cramming as much incident and as many characters as possible into its 100 minutes.

The resulting confection is engaging, in a rather silly kind of a way. Fabrice Lucchini plays Beaumarchais, a watchmaker by profession who climbs the social ladder through a couple of judicious marriages. Constantly involved in duels, court cases, scandals and spy rings, he still finds time to write The Barber Of Seville and The Marriage Of Figaro.

This is not one of those pofaced French historical dramas indeed, at times it seems closer to the spirit of the Carry On movies than anything else. Molinaro's enthusiastic depiction of France in the immediate pre-revolutionary period has Beaumarchais the embodiment of the revolutionary spirit - an ambitious bourgeois, a free-thinker and a thorn in the side of the authorities.

Everything is thrown into the pot - we find that not only did the writer sustain the American Revolution with secret arms shipments, he also spied to his country in England. Along the way, he establishes the idea of droits d'auter (a principle close to the hearts of French film directors), and we are led to believe that The Marriage Of Figaro in particular, was instrumental in causing the fall of the Bastille.