J'aimerais pas crever un dimanche

For reasons that are beyond me, French cinema seems to come with movies about such controversial subjects quite often (although they also produce more "mainstream" movies, believe me). If you are willing to watch a movie dealing with love, sex, AIDS and death and where the limits between good and evil are systematically blurred, this one does quite a clever job. If not, you have been warned.

P.S: Don't believe all this is normal behaviour in France...

1 hour and half about death and only death. But I was hooked up since the first minute. Dark and poetic. Raw love and disgust at the same time. A boat drafting in the fog, since the day we are born, only hurting the ones that love us until we die. I saw it 22 years ago and I still remember it as one of the best movie I have seen.

The picture is about using sexual deviation to cure tedium. Here is a group of people who are living boring lives so they are experimenting with sexual variation to give them a quick fix. This creates more impairment to these discontented people and as such the results are they become even more miserable. The end result is you get to share a "slice of life" with unhappy people having meaningless deviant sexual encounters with other unhappy people while looking for some substance in there lives. If this doesn't sound like a wonderful way to spend the evening, then I also agree.

The central character works in a morgue and some of his coworkers exchange girl friends/wives, watch home made pornography and contribute to the debasement of the women who love them. They spend the time in-between yelling at each other and feeling sorry for how miserable their lives are. The only time there is any warmth in the movie is when they are visiting their friend who is dying of AIDS. This subplot is suppose to give us some reference about life and death but it is overshadowed by the selfish behavior of the leading roles. Besides the main character who has three women who care for him and he treats them all with disdain there is a suicidal man and a lady who had died recently of a drug overdose but managed to come back to life. The main character introduced the other two into his world of S&M, general depravity but mostly humiliation. They seen to get along fine, as they are as screwed up as he is. The man keeps a book of all his sexual encounters as this is the meaning for his life and the girl is just a bored youth living on ecstasy and techno music. This movie is not about sexual obsession like Damage, Turkish Delight or even Last Tango in Paris it is about boredom, plain and not so simple. The result left me not caring about the main character, not caring what these people do and only feeling sorry for the female roles that are played with some feeling and sensitivity but not enough to save this movie from being lackluster and unmoving.

sex, death and immorality. That is, about the truth. So beautiful to me for these very reasons. Become an atheist (tip: read Karl Marx) and then watch this. Karl Marx said was a materialist. That means that, according to he and other materialists (not the Madonna type, exactly), what you perceive with your senses corresponds to something outside your mind, to matter. Not everyone believes/believed that. Some think that it's all in your head, that your sensations are just that, that there is no physical world that you are perceiving through your senses. They are called idealists. Some idealist believed your perceptions are beamed into your head by God, or that everything is thought... And some are not sure and play it safe. They are agnostics. Which is just Greek for "I'm clueless." If you say I'm a materialist then you take a physical world for granted, you trust your senses and you live according to the world you perceive. Marx started there and also said, gods and philosophy and tastes and governmental forms are just results of the pattern of fundamental human interaction: how we eat (by working in the fields? by barter? in a factory?), which determines social hierarchy, which determines our hopes and aspiration and self-image, which determines religion and what is presented as "absolute truth," be it the best form of government or the best art or... SO...if you like that...and you find yourself an atheist...you find yourself FREE. And no longer hide truths by censoring yourself with the "thou shalt not"s you have learned and never questioned. And then also, perhaps, life can become very bare bones, vivid, brutal. And then this film shows the bones so beautifully.

I recently saw this film at the Second Annual NY S/M Film Festival.

The movie wrestles such topics as alternative sexuality, AIDS and death. Unfortunately, it wrestles these topics as only the French can do... Pretentious and boring. Even the scene in a French Leather Club just boggled my mind in how unrealistic it was. Everyone in this film seemed to be suffering from some major mental and emotional breakdown, and frankly, it was just a very depressing movie to watch.