Un, deux, trois, soleil

I am rarely moved to comment on movies but I think that this little gem has been overlooked. This is a poignant, even beautiful movie about growing up, poverty, life in seedy housing projects and, for me, most importantly loving, giving mixed ethnic communities that nurture and support everyone. It may be a little idealized but the point is well made. Anouk Grinberg is utterly captivating as the gamine adolescent, strong and vulnerable, playing her part with an intelligence that is rare and to be cherished. The cast, including the children, play their roles with spirit and are absolutely believable. I did not find the subtitles distracting (knowing a little French helped) and let the performances speak for themselves. A remarkable little movie that has spirit, is socially relevant, even today, and brilliantly filmed. I am so glad I didn't listen to the overly negative review that was prominent on IMDb and would urge everyone with a grain of compassion to watch this movie and be moved and uplifted.

This is a one of the most underrated movies of all time. It's worth viewing if only for the excellent performance of Marcello Mastroianni. It tells the story of Victorine, a girl living in a suburb of a big city. The movie has a surreal undertone and does not explain everything so the viewer can use their own imagination to fill in the gaps. A special mention for the suberb music by Khaled.

"Un, Deux, Trois, Soleil" is a ten year old French flick recently released on DVD probably to capitalize on the names of Bier or the late Mastroianni. However, the film, a dramady, which tells of the misadventures of a post pubescent school girl growing up in Marseille (played by 30 year old Grinberg) is neither sufficiently engaging nor funny to make it worth all the subtitle reading. Much of the humor is lost in translation and the film's warmth soon grows fallow as the weak slice-of-life plot grows increasingly insipid. Probably not worthwhile for anyone other than French speakers into French films who have seen all the more recent and much better stuff. (C)

Memory and longing can make of our lives a continuous present tense in which those we've lost have dinner with us, in which we can call them from the grave whenever we wish, in which we can kill them as often as we like. And if we are the pretty, hyperactive daughter of demented (Italian? Spanish?) mother and pastis-drowned father, living in a nightmare suburban project in Marseilles among the walking driftwood and the detritus of loving humanity, in which crime is a career and rape a rite of passage, we are seven, seventeen, twenty-seven in the same moment while the hybrid sounds of Euro/Algerian/Camerounian music, chewing, cursing, laughing, fighting, sexing, loving, accompany us perpetually as in the old melodrama, except that it is so alive, funny, moving, devastating and rescuing all at once that we are enthralled and left with the happy/sad feeling of a life lived. A movie to be lived in and remembered with fondness.

In a warm town of Marseille, a teenager, clamped among a crazy mother and an alcoholic father, looks desperately for tenderness. On bottom of gloomy suburb, Bertrand Blier delivers, once more, an unclassifiable film and gladly provocative, who can leave you perplexed but not indifferent.