Loucuras de uma Primavera

Took this out of the Louis Malle box without paying too much attention and was not aware of the date, or that the title translated to 'May Fools'. So once the family are back at their country house after the death of their mother and the background news is of the '68 Paris riots, I'm assuming this is a vaguely contemporary film. But no, as becomes increasingly obvious this is 20 years on and a look back at those 'mad' country folk with more money than sense. It is an engaging but slight film with a rather pretentious element that gets i the way of the slight humour and vague attempts at political insight. Piccoli is great as ever and Miou-Miou as lovely as ever. Worth a watch but probably only one.

I've long felt that Louis Malle was my favourite French director. Pushing out the cinematic envelope with his honest perceptions about real people, but with a sort of steady verve. They can be challenging, always absorbing but none like Milou in May -

• which is one of wonderfully loose 'no lectures today' sort of light comedies about the country-set all getting hot and bothered about sorting out funeral arrangements. The fact is that there's a national strike which causes difficulties for the various interested parties in getting there and that Paris is literally burning with the '68 student riots. But those same facts are wonderfully incidental, revealing maybe how different the upper middle class country retreats are away from poor, clashing students in the big City. Physically, socially and economically.

A playful Stefan Grapelli score delights, with a lush, so lush (it IS May) cinematography which added the cream on top of the cake, with added witty dialogue, and almost fantastical characters. They might be a little caricatured, but with an oh! so, charismatic lead. We all dreamed of uncles like that when we were ten years old! As they hang about waiting for the rest to turn up, the lazy, hazy May afternoon strolls on, with a wisp of sex and drug taking, it's an intoxicating blend of slight naughtiness to spice up a usually (for most people) unpleasant but necessary gathering.

This is Kodachrome Malle, rather than his monochrome.

It's easy to understand why the late Louis Malle was such a respected filmmaker after seeing this comedy of manners, inspired (again) by the director's own childhood memories. The film begins when a grandmother's death in the spring of 1968 reunites three generations of family at a country estate in southern France. But their mingled grief and affection is soon overshadowed by news of the student riots in faraway Paris, and their already fragile bourgeois equilibrium is unbalanced by the distant echoes of uninhibited anarchy. The parallels between the family crisis and the world at large are obvious, but rarely has a corpse lying in state been surrounded by so much activity: private longings, public declarations, old resentments and new romances are all given sudden priority over preparations for the old woman's burial. Consistently graceful, often surprising, the film is an affectionate valentine from Malle to the extended family of his youth, and a gift to discriminating movie audiences during a long, dry summer.

This is a movie about the romantic awakening of an open-minded, freckle-faced ingénue named ... hold on, Milou turns out to be a gentle and wizened giant of a man, played by Michel Piccoli, who has apparently learned to live with an inappropriately cute nickname. He is living on his mother's country estate, and generally enjoying the decelerated life of landed gentry. Then his mother dies and his siblings descend on the mansion, threatening his casual existence (or maybe just questioning Milou's privilege of doing FA for a living). At the same time, the riots of 1968 are unfolding in far-away Paris.

The small group represent the different attitudes of French society at the time, we have the idealistic student who is overly anxious to see the arrival of a new world order, alongside the bourgeois reactionary who is somewhat less enthusiastic about horde of bearded baba cools putting up barricades, a housemaid who just wants to get her share of the inheritance, as well as a woman who feels impelled to take her top off for some reason. At one point, the group flee into the woods, and return the next morning. Somehow, the biggest bourgeois of all, Milou, is untouched by the quarrels around him and ends up continuing to live his placid mansion life, seemingly because he is so quaint and affable.

This movie had a few good ideas and moments, but it kind of runs out of ideas and plot after the family is assembled and their individual positions are established. In the end it's more or less a showcase for Michel Piccoli.

I wonder why it is not better known? You would think it would be, it is a beautiful movie, maybe not among Malle's very best, but certainly very good. There's a bittersweet feeling and it is also quite funny, as when the sisters are fighting over which one the mother wanted to leave her jewelry to.

Michel Piccoli is one of my favorite actors, and all the other parts are well done too.

Plus, the setting and photography are so beautiful. Somewhere in the Gers I think. When Milou is walking through the vines with his elderly foreman, I drool.

Just the sort of small, beautiful, mellow, not too elaborate country house and vineyard I want for myself when I win the Loterie Nationale!