Le jour des idiots

A film that makes you ask yourself while watching: Why am I doing this to myself? Werner Schroeter's "Day of the Idiots" is a Kafkaesque experiment between madness and boredom.

A woman with too much free time voluntarily provokes herself into the nuthouse - as if that were an insight. Is that supposed to be a social critique? Or simply proof that self-abandonment can be an art form?

Carole Bouquet is at least pretty to look at - that makes it easier to watch. But where is the absurd humor? Fassbinder would have spiced it up with weird dialogue and grotesque wit. Instead, it remains an artfully staged but sluggish trip into nothingness.

The bizarre narrative style and the interesting camera work save the film from complete insignificance. It is boring, but in an artful way. And that deserves a certain amount of recognition.

Carol Schneider (Carole Bouquet) leads an aimless life with her lover Alexander. Finding no possibility to express herself in the "outside" society, she moves on to an "inside" society - inside a lunatic asylum, that is! She prefers this world to the real world, despite its many terrors (one inmate even commits suicide), but she is unable to exist in either of them. Carole Bouquet, famous for Bunuel's "Obscure Object of Desire" and arriving straight from shooting the James Bond movie "For Your Eyes Only", played her most memorable role - a mad person in a mad world - in this tormenting vision of Werner Schroeter, who certainly was neither trying to make an accessible picture nor to avoid anything shocking. If you prefer something you still shall remember next year over the fast food flicks you have forgotten tomorrow, I think it is worth trying.