A very different reaction was expressed when the film appeared in Great Britain, where the apparent frivolity of an old-fashioned musical comedy presented by a director previously known for intellectual seriousness caused indignation and incomprehension. "An inert, sclerotic piece of nonsense with unendurably mannered performances", "a flavourless adaptation... banal lyrics... philistine jokes about the arts...", "laboriously frothy", and "excruciatingly embarrassing" were among the typical responses of British reviewers. Elsewhere however it was pointed out that over the previous 20 years Resnais had repeatedly demonstrated his cinematic engagement with various forms of popular culture (the strip-cartoon in "I Want to Go Home", boulevard theatre in "Mélo", the popular song in "On connaît la chanson"), and that here again he was doing same for Parisian operetta with genuine affection, and without adopting "the posture of a high-art auteur bending down to, or 'reworking', a popular genre". Referring to the use of anachronistic devices, the same reviewer noted that "part of the attraction is also in film's distanced nature - the modernist director has not entirely disappeared".