Milou en mai

Erm... I feel a little embarrassed; I can't join in the praise for this film, which I found too long and too unfocused. Louis Malle seems to have thought that just following Michel Piccoli around the estate as he tends to the bees and catches crabs, among other duties, while Stéphane Grappelli plays his winsome harmonica was enough to keep us engrossed. The real story is what was going on in Paris and other large cities in May 1968 (it was quite dramatic, as I recall from my safe haven in North America).

The story is flimsy: Milou and his brother Georges along with Milou's daughter Camille and Georges's children Claire and Pierre-Alain gather to attend the funeral of Mme. Vieuzac and distribute the family goods. Claire and Camille have a lively argument about the heritage, which disturbs Milou. His life has been so tranquil up to now...

The actors are let loose to give us a succession of star moments. Piccoli has his scene with the crabs, Miou-Miou her dalliance with the lawyer (superb François Berléand), Bruno Carette shows up midway as the lusty truck driver, Paulette Dubost is included as a tribute to the generation of Renoir and Carné. Finally Dominique Blanc as Georges's lesbian daughter has the best moments: she plays a Debussy piece ferociously as she watches her girlfriend flirting with Pierre-Alain. You can practically see the smoke pouring out of the piano. She also tantalizes the trucker--and us--with her bare breasts.

I don't know which director did the best account of the events of 68; possibly Wexler with his Medium Cool. Malle has not carried us back to those frenzied days, but has given us a series of vignettes as a way to show off the talents of his cast.

Malle made only two films after this one, Damage, and Vanya On 42nd Street and it's tempting to view Milou en Mai as a rehearsal for Vanya though in the end the differences outweigh the similarities. It IS set on a country estate that is running to seed and there IS a 'Vanya' figure in Milou himself (Michel Piccoli) who more or less tends the estate in the absence of his siblings - one deceased, one pursuing his own career. There IS a family gathering with all that that implies, bickering, truth-telling, laughter, tears, accusations, recriminations etc. Perhaps above all it is a MOOD piece which does put it in the same universe as Chekhov but it is ultimately too easy to read it in this way. It was a masterstroke to place it at the time of the student riots in Paris, May, 1968 and this strengthens the links with Chekhov who, of course, wrote his own masterpieces at a time when Russia was undergoing changes unacknowledged by his gentlefolk with their heads in the metaphorical sand of dachas serenely remote from the turbulence. This is a film of great lyricism and melancholia with a gentle Jazz music score by Stephane Grappelly and the action, such as it is, is kick-started by the death of Milou's mother which necessitates summoning the family for the funeral. Again like Chekhov what we have here is an ensemble piece rather than Leading Man, Leading Lady, Juvenile, Ingenue, etc and the acting is uniformly excellent from Miou-Miou as Milou's daughter, Camille, to Francois Berleand as the family lawyer who drives a red Alfa Romeo and still carries a torch for Camille, to Valerie Lemercier in the small but telling role of Madame Boutelleau. The events in far-off Paris punctuate but are not allowed to dominate and barely to influence the action leaving the family - and non-family - to quarrel, couple, fail-to-couple and relate the occasional home truth. In short a lovely Autumnal movie.

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.

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.

Louis Malle was one of the most notable members of the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) french movement that was an alternative to film reconstructions historical and literary adaptations commonly "infidels" as they used to do filmmakers Delannoy, Autant-Lara and some others, because, unlike these, the New Wave advocated an approach to the problem of the individual to privacy, their personal experiences.

But like the rest of their comrades (with the exception of Truffaut), Louis Malle also realized that this new path, it could anchor a bourgeois and individualistic conception of life and needed to be linked to analysis of social problems, seeking more openness and greater narrative ideological commitment. So did "Lacombe Lucien", an energetic recreation of the effects left by fascism. And, among others, "Alamo Bay", on the reaction of the Vietnamese Americans living there, after the failure of the war.

Until that arrives "MILOU EN MAI", a metaphor for the state and the system, full of irony and black humor of the finest. Milou's mother, Mrs. Vieuzac, is representing the state: the owner of everything. Their children, grandchildren and sons-in-law, are the bourgeoisie, owners of power in the state. Claire, the maid, is the proletariat, the heir to only a quarter of the estate of Mrs. Vieuzac. The main prototypes come to life: the landowner, the reactionary intellectual, trader, bourgeois ladies...

With a delicious dialogue through participation in the old script by Luis Bunuel collaborator Jean Claude Carriere ("Now women complicated everything. Before they knew it was not an orgasm and it was easier"), a delightful musical score with the great jazz style of Stephane Grappelli, and beaten with that herd, Louis Malle reconstructs the warm and vibrant time of May 68', in which there was a social class who knew everything, understood everything and was consistent with everything... until that any solace to meddle in its liabilities.

In a wonderful characterization, Michel Piccoli represents Milou, the provincial intellectual who suddenly is surrounded by its unique family at the announcement of the death of his mother. When that nice breed, feel that the facts are about to touch them directly, they decide to leave the field (are excluded). What follows is better that you see it, you'll find people have probably already seen in your neighborhood or on your street and you'll realize, perhaps, that many things are not as they seem.

"MILOU EN MAI", is a piece of film hard to forget.