My name is not Patrick

When I recorded The Walls of Malapaga last year, it was a 90-minute movie put in a two-hour time slot. This left time for a two reeler, and TCM ran the French short All the Boys Are Called Patrick.

The plot is simple. Charlotte (Anne Colette) and Véronique (Nicole Berger) are roommates in a small apartment and fellow students. One day they each go out on their own, and each of them meets a nice young man. Charlotte meets one called Patrick (Jean-Claude Brialy) and after chatting with him, decides she'll go out on a date with him the next day. Véronique meets a man who is also named Patrick, which isn't surprising since it's the same Patrick! She too takes up the offer to go on a date the next day.

Did Patrick forget he's setting up multiple dates, or is he cleverly setting them up at different times? Anyhow, back at the apartment, Charlotte and Véronique talk about the guy they met, and each of them makes fun of the other's taste in men because the two are describing what sounds like rather different personalities. Of course, they don't know they're talking to the same guy. So what's going to happen when they go to their date and find out they'll be dating the same guy?

All the Boys Are Called Patrick was a fun little short, without too much of what I tend to find to be the more artsy pretension of its director, Jean-Luc Godard. It did get a DVD release as an extra on Criterion's edition of Godard's later A Woman Is a Woman, although that DVD is apparently out of print. However, there is a MOD DVD of A Woman Is a Woman, which I would presume does not have any extras on it.