P'tit Quinquin

Well, it's actually a TV series but I watched the whole thing in one sitting. My jaw dropped. This is not a film for the casual viewer. It is bewildering, full of unattractive people, many of of them with facial ticks, mental problems or just a plain ugliness. The themes are rich and deep, exploring so many aspects of human nature one loses count. The acting by seemingly first timers is first rate. It's reviewed mostly as a comedy but it's not laugh out loud kind of funny. Instead it's a satire on human nature, making one gulp with the truth of the telling. Take heed, don't watch this is you don't like squirming a little bit when faced with the naked truth. But if you're willing to invest yourself in this film, your time will not be for naught. It's not life changing but does make you think and most of all, feel.

Maybe the slap-shtick brings more of les chuckles overseas. Some cultures are more able to look at misfortune or even misanthropy.

I appreciate not taking a treacly path, but there seems to be a mean-spirited undercurrent here; one that all the awkward hugs in the world may not dispel.

If everyone is an idiot, then who are we the viewers? That's a bit too harsh, but Dumont's world-view may be harsher. Ultimately the payoff of this long film (or short TV series) just did not deliver, of course the same may be said of "Twin Peaks" which I see referenced in other reviews.

I do feel like David Lynch would be happy to sit among his characters, and have a fine cup of coffee. As he does! I'd be a little hesitant to sit down with this directory and share a cup of whatever he's hoping to serve here.

I might watch more films from (or read some interviews with) the director, maybe he fancies himself a "bad boy of cinema." More likely the punchlines did not land with me, while some of the punches did. A friend had recommended this as a comedy, but the flavor for me at least was far more funny strange, than funny ha-ha.

This clearly wasn't my kind of movie and I only stuck with it based on a trusted reviewer's recommendation whom I would no longer completely trust if only I remembered just who that reviewer was.

This movie isn't completely unredeemable. There were moments of genuine laugh out loud comedy, but the reason you stick with the story is to see its conclusion, which either wasn't given or I was so done with the movie by the time it ended that I just didn't notice, but I have a feeling it's the former; and with how painfully slow and seemingly pointless the movie is, I wouldn't be surprised if the writer thought it was brilliant to have the story end without a conclusion because 'that's life, it's slow and there aren't always answers' but, assuming that was the intent, that's not why people see movies. Even the most out-there artistic movies still have an ending as to not lose an audience completely. Again, nothing against the people who made this movie. I clearly should've stopped 30 minutes in, but even though this movie's clearly not for me, not for most people (at one point I screamed, not in reaction to an offensive moment but successive, offensively boring ones, "this was on tv?! Who would watch this?! Well, tv is very different in other countries."), I find disturbing the seemingly unanimous critical praise. I don't trust Roger Ebert's website. Every time his site's review comes up in a movie's search, the review always seems backwards, praising terrible movies and being too critical of not-that-bad ones. He's dead, obviously. I'm saying whoever's writing in his name seems to have a very backwards view of culture, so his 4/4 rating was not at all surprising to me and his postmortem reviews carry no weight in my eyes. That being said, every other review seems to give this movie similar high praise. Were they watching the same movie? Did they really love every meandering, dialogue-free, action-free, progress-free moment? I find it very hard to believe that these reviewers would praise an equally abhorrently slow and pointless superhero movie.

And I wholeheartedly agree with another reviewer (here on imdb) who said this movie feels like it needs serious editing. It's not uncommon to hear of movies who's first cut was approaching 4 hours but was whittled down to 2.5, but I know the torturous pacing was deliberate, which makes me dislike it all the more. This movie feels like it was made to turn away people who wouldn't like or get it. Movies should be accessible. That's not to say cookie-cutter or inoffensive. I neither got nor liked Killing of a Sacred Deer and yet in a strange way that I struggle to put into words, I consider it a good movie in spite of (or perhaps because of) its going against everything I believe about filmmaking because it stuck with me. I didn't agree with how the story was told and I didn't get the larger point - the little of it I did I disagreed with - but it all felt purposeful. Maybe that's why Killing's offensiveness was magnetic whereas Quinquin's was repellent. Accessibility, at least for me, means a sense of purpose within and around the story. There was definitely (although with how slow everything else played out this seemed rushed) a smaller message or at least exploration of racism in France, but other than that I couldn't even sense a purpose out of my reach as with Killing. The only purpose I felt was, as I said above, the writer really liking to document the slowness, purposelessness, and imperfection of real life (that last one actually being a good thing, what gave the movie both uniqueness and life, but heavily weighed down by the first two). Beyond that I saw no purpose and that's what made this movie repellently different as opposed to magnetic.

The film is about a spoiled, racist brat surrounded by feckless, over-the-top incompetent adults. The adults are so beyond caricature in their incompetence that it utterly fails to be funny. It is ostensibly a black comedy, but the humour, for me at any rate, consistently fell flat. While it at least avoids the vulgarity of the very worst Hollywood comedies, they at least have the decency to be brief. This meanders pointlessly, with uninteresting subplots added seemingly for no reason other than padding. Also, jokes that weren't funny the first time are repeated again and again. Finally, none of the characters are particularly interesting nor sympathetic. For me, this quickly fell into "I don't care what happens to any of these people" and once that happens even murder utterly fails to be interesting.

...overlaid with a bumbling murder investigation, and the result is a gem of comedic filmmaking and social satire embedded in a humanistic portrayal of contemporary French peasantry. Dumont dares to portray prejudices, pettiness, and brutality of rural life without malice or ridicule. Gendarmes, Van der Weyden and Carpentier, are as funny as their counterparts, Manchin and Malfoy, were in Slack Bay, yet less the buffoons of that film than simply odd and ignorant. I grealy appreciate such honest, often tender. portrayals of common people amidst a sea of films focused on elites, bourgeouisie, and artificial characters.