Pas de repos pour les braves

I just bought the DVD of "No Rest for the Brave", and I got to say it's quite unique. Director Alain Guiraudie likes to create surrealism with every day settings and situations and slightly distort them. His focus on colors grabs the viewers attention. The film starts off kind of slow, because their is a lot of dialog. The main character is afraid to go to sleep, because he is convinced he will never wake up and is afraid he will die. Then strange things start to happen, a whole village is killed and he could be responsible, but are the events happening a dream? He's sexually obsessed with an older man, has discussions on life with a folk singer farmer and many other odd characters. Then it gets to a point where the viewer can't tell what's happening in the the main character's life or in his dreams. It seems nothing much exciting is happening in his life, so his adventures take place mostly in his dreams. So the film is kind of like a french existential Donnie Darko as filmed by Godard. It's definitely a film you have to think about. I personally enjoyed it.

It seems that Jean-Luc Godard still has a lot to answer for. Some 60 years after his Brainless got the Pseuds into such a lather young filmmakers are still finding that off-the-wall, outre, call it what you will remains as good a substitute for talent for them as it did for him. This time around one Alain Guiraudie has come up with a scenario in which a guy named Basile - or it COULD be Hector - gets it into his head that if he falls asleep he will never wake up and - I'm guessing here and your guess is as good as mine - in the throes of sleep deprivation appears to undergo the type of hallucinations he could just as easily acquire via substance abuse. Whether he did actually massacre an entire small village, have an affair with a 60 year-old man, fly a red plane abortively, etc is really academic because like Godard before him Guiraudie has either not learned or has chosen to deliberately ignore Rule #1. Entertain the audience. Academics will cream in their pants over this one because it's open to so many interpretations it'll keep them writing papers and lecturing for years. On the other hand the non-academic film-goer will take one look and say merde.

One of the hardest things for humans to do is to explain a dream and make it interesting. Herein lies the biggest problem of "No Rest for the Brave." Rare is the viewer who will make it to the end of this oddly beautiful but frustrating film. First, for the non-native French speaker, this is a film heavy on the dialog – lots of it and it comes at you machine gun fast which translates into being forced to read constantly and as fast as you can.

In a nutshell "No Rest" tells the story of a boy – Basille (also with an alter-ego called Hector) a 16 year old who believes he's approaching the penultimate sleep – one more night with his eyes closed and he will die. So, sleep deprived, he is forever in a state of semi-consciousness living more in a dream state than the real world. It becomes increasingly difficult (if not downright impossible) to figure out what is real and what isn't. Does Basille really kill an entire village? Is he having an affair with a 60 year old man? Does he really drive around in an airplane he can't get off the ground? What is the significance of "little red balls?" Is there really an improper "season" for eating foie gras? If one allows themselves to fall into this world, the difference between reality and dreaming ultimately doesn't matter.

Director Alain Guiraudie creates a beautiful, surreal existential plane wherein the Bassile and those who populate his life (and dreams) reside. There are images that are breathtakingly beautiful – such as Basille's red plane's attempted take off, or the image of him wildly, violently dancing 70's punk style to an acoustic guitar song in a brightly lit pool hall.

I thought I would gouge my eyes out after 20 minutes or so, but once I "let go" and just watched it on its own terms and fell in love with this oddball, beautiful picture.