A Crise

Another Coline Serreau film with Vincent London. Similar to previous two I have seen, this one also has a surrealistic bent.

It tries to show a mirror to our society And the reflection that we see is not pretty.

While I liked this film, I was not blown over by it as I was Chaos and "La Belle Verte". Both of them by same director and both a little surrealistic in nature. Maybe I was not in mood for the film and I may have to watch it again.

Still it is a good film. And Vincent London has done a fine job as always.

This movie gives a good view, although somewhat distorted, of France in the 90s.

A man in his mid-life crisis loses his wife, his kids and his job the same day. He then goes through a picaresque journey with a nitwit side kick he finds on his way and whom he decides to help.

The man, played by a very good Vincent Lindon, meets friends, friends of friends, and relatives, and realizes what the true reasons of his failures are.

Everybody is going through his own crisis and the main character realizes that everybody's life sucks (or does it really?)

This film treats about every social problems in our modern societies: solitude, lack of love, lack of work, lack of understanding, lack of appreciation.

Some of the characters are a little bit cliches, but most of them give a very very good interpretation. I also think that the cliches are very acceptable because the whole atmosphere of the movie is very surrealistic.

Look out for the scene with the parents. It's my personal favorite.

On the same day, Victor (Vincent Lindon) loses both his wife and a very lucrative job in his firm. Miserable and hopeless he's looking for his friends and family in the country to tell his personal turmoil and hoping to find some relief. But he only receives indifference or misunderstanding. Only a little man Michou (Patrick Timsit) is his confident and seems to be the key to solve Victor's inner trouble.

Coline Serreau is known and even celebrated in France for her popular comedy "Trois Hommes et Un Couffin" (1985) with which she scored a big hit so much so that an American remake followed a couple of years later. Its follow-up, "Romuald et Juliette" (1989) didn't have as much impact. With "la Crise", she pored over the mood of French society at the dawn of the nineties and it's a rather gloomy one. Her film could walk a fine line with works such as Gérard Jugnot's "une Epoque Formidable" (1991). In this film, Jugnot favored laughter to assess a French society driven by financial laws and having lost human values.

Coline Serreau takes back these observations and on a frenetic pace, she also relies on a sharp analysis of French society tangled up in stress and absence of communication but also politics eaten up by dishonesty and bribery. Her methodology to keep smiles on the viewer's face is shrewd: every time Victor meets someone and starts to tell him about his devilish day, he can't finish his story because his friends and family are amid their own problems and it's the opportunity for them to lay their souls bare and to express their formidable honesty and thoughts about who they really are or think. This method works but has also its evident limits in the sense that it makes the film a little monotonous and breathless by moments. But overall, Coline Serreau pulls it off with gusto to make us laugh of our woes.

"La Crise" was nominated in several categories at the César awards ceremony in 1993 including Best Female Supporting Roles for Maria Pacôme and Zabou and it's a shame that they didn't catch it. The first one has only 15-20 minutes of appearance while the second one has about half an hour of presence on the screen but one clearly remembers their shows in which they demand to live their lives their own ways. In counterpart, the film garnered the César for the Best Scenario and I have my doubts about it because if Serreau's work is formidable but a little dull in its humorist conception, things go wrong in the last half hour when she adopts a conventional, cozy tone with an acceptation of naive solutions. It throws the film a little off balance and loses a part of its strength.

See it anyway, its several ferociously funny moments make it worthwhile and fifteen years later, the thrust of "la Crise" is still a topical one.

A very fine script, with a series of crises that just won't stop. Crises staged around various themes: couples breaking up, redundancies, medicine, politics, immigration and more. One crisis after another, bordering on hysteria. Coline Serreau's dialogue is also memorable. We're not necessarily dealing with anything very subtle, with some scenes very much in evidence, but the constant sequence of events doesn't leave the viewer any time to ponder such questions. The main film conductor is Vincent Lindon, who is involved in most of the crises. And he finds himself accompanied by Patrick Timsit, a homeless man who ends up following him everywhere. Obviously, Vincent Lindon's character will evolve and become aware of his relationship with others: wife, friend, work colleague. The film calms down in its final section, though it remains virulent, notably with the encounter with politics.

In terms of form, there's little music, apart from the use of chamber music. It has to be said that the brilliance of the dialogues leaves little room for music.

With Les Visiteurs & Le Dîner de Cons, this movie is the funniest French film of the 1990's. It's from Coline Serreau, from the Trois Hommes et un Couffin fame. It's a movie about urban loneliness and indifference, also about the broken families. How can you make fun with such subjects? Miss Serreau did, thanks to a very strong story and a great acting from Patrick Timsit, who becomes a major star after this film. Let's see this to have some real intelligent fun, before Hollywood grabs it for another massacre of French movies.