Merci la vie

When I first saw this flick, I thought it was 20 years ahead of its time. Nine years later, I'd like to review the "20" part of it. Say "30" instead. It was an important flick for me. A reflection on cinema, reality and time. I remember reading a "Letter to the editor" in the local paper (La Presse) in which the "reader" expressed his disgust for the film. Nothing is disgusting about it. "Challenging" maybe. "Disturbing". Never "Disgusting", unless one is disgusting by the story of a young woman spreading an imaginary mortal sexually transmissible disease for the local doctor to prosper.

Of course, since and before, other experiences were made, but this one is not to be overlooked. A must.

... and you get the film that made me understand what cinema was all about.

The simple story of two teenagers meeting at no time. The candid one, Camille, makes the audience, the more experienced one, Joelle, provides the story: in the 80s or 90s, a foolish lover decides to exploit her sickness (AIDS) to contaminate the male population of his provincial town and gain on the visits of his new patients... the clever man is a GP.

The story is made even more interesting when it suddenly jumps from one period of the 20th century to the other, France under occupation during the second world war. Whatever the period, the drama is the same.

What I liked so much in this film is the way Blier makes the last jump, when the film is no longer about the story but about the crew of the film. It is not only a simple effect, it goes on showing that life is a drama whatever the situation, that even if Joelle is an actress, still she can live the same drama.

The other great thing about this film is that you can't help comparing it with Blier's 'Les Valseuses', and read it as the story of friendship and liberty at two different times (70's for les valseuses). This is not just because of the story line, but is present at almost every shots. From the meeting of the two encounters to simple shots on the road, where both walk, one slower than the other, like an unbalanced pair.

One of those few movies which changed my life - well, stayed in my consciousness for a long time. You won't like it if you don't suspend conventional expectations about plot, story, time lines, conclusions etc. as they're irrelevant here. Blier plays with just about everything he can lay his camera on, including the audience (particularly the audience). This movie is like a roller-coaster ride under the influence of a healthy dose of caffeine (at least)...

Great little movie about big stuff - expect to be surprised at every tangent and put your cerebrally charged glasses on. Having said that, the 90% degree turns zap along largely without the aid of soulless special effects or computer-generated eye-candy. 8 out of 10 in my view for originality and creative endeavour.

If you want to see something different, watch this movie.

If you can bear the first 15 minutes, then you will be able to enjoy it all.

I enjoyed every minutes of that movie. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Anouk Grinberg are great. I am usually very good at predicting what will happen next in a movie. But not this time. I had no idea where Bertrand Blier was going. And he was going there real fast. He plays with everything (the story, lighting, music, actors).

According to me, it's his best movie.

This movie starts out with a VERY common French movie plot about two young women--a homeless drifter (Anouk Grinsberg) and a teenager (Charlotte Gainsbourg) whose parents are away--befriending each other and deciding to "explore their sexuality" together. Director Bertrand Blier then, however, decides to spin the story in all kinds of, uh, interesting, directions. The two mischievous minxes torment a slow-witted handyman with cherry bombs and by nearly blowing up his car before they both have sex with him (shades of "Don't Deliver Us from Evil"). Even in these more "realistic" scenes though the footage switches from really bleached out to brightly colored, and the actresses costumes suddenly change accordingly (much like Peter Greenaway's "The Cook, the Thief, his wife, and Her Lover").

There is then a long horror-ish sub-plot where it turns out the older of the girls has been intentionally infected with a dangerous and contagious venereal disease by a mad doctor (Gerard Depardieu)--kind of like a black comedy version of David Cronenberg's "Shivers"--and the whole town is howling for her blood. Then suddenly the movie goes into a bizarre version of "Back to the Future" where the two girls are apparently back in time and trying to convince the younger girl's parents to conceive her. The older girl promises sex to the milquetoast father in order to get him interested in his wife while the younger girl reasonably points out that if she isn't born, he will never get to have sex with her friends later! In the middle of all this, there is an annoying Fellini-esque device with a film crew hanging around, which suggests the whole thing is just a movie--although even for a movie, it's bizarre beyond belief. And the end probably goes too far with Holocaust imagery of a lot of naked people packed on a freight train. . .

I would actually consider this movie a litmus test of how much you like French art cinema in general. If you find this pretentious and indulgent, you probably don't, but if you find it entertaining in its off-the-wall irreverence and failure conform to the standard Hollywood movie structure, you would almost certainly be a fan of French cinema in general. I think pretty EVERYBODY is a fan of sexy French actresses though regardless. Anouk Grinsberg has all the nude/sex scenes, but then 19-year-old Charlotte Gainsbourg spends most of the movie in a pair of very short cut-offs that accentuate her long legs and perfect body. I would reckon it would take this younger Gainsbourg about five minutes to seduce any of the idiot males who call her "ugly" nowadays simply because she has had the temerity to appear in fairly explicit Lars Von Trier movies even though she is in her early forties now.

Although this definitely tried my patience at times, I can't say I didn't like it. I would recommend it to fans of French cinema in general, but if you really don't like French cinema, you should probably avoid it.