P'tit Quinquin

This film is overly long and meandering, which is frustrating because too many scenes should be edited more carefully. Several scenes, like the funeral of Mme Lebleu, went on far too long. Also, there are too many unnecessary inserts into scenes. For example, in a restaurant in fourth episode, where the commandant is talking to a public official, there's a family with a disruptive son who is mentally handicapped. There is no reason for this family to be featured in this particular scene. This kind of fragmentation detracts from the already thin storyline. I don't recommend this film unless you have watched everything else and have plenty of time to waste.

With an interesting premise... outstanding scenery....a great unknown ensemble cast.... a quirky almost perverse lead, this had soooo much potential to be entertaining. But NO... simply a waste of 3 1/2 hours as time after time a thread begins... a thought line is shared with premise and it is all for naught. Watched every minute. Gave it every chance to entertain and yet.... it fails on soooo many levels I was too stunned to even be angry that I hadn't quit in the first hour and a half. The esoteric hokum reviews written by supposed elitists who think there are messages here simply missed the joke. NOT trying to be mean....it was just THAT bad.

Well, it's actually a TV series but I watched the whole thing in one sitting. My jaw dropped. This is not a film for the casual viewer. It is bewildering, full of unattractive people, many of of them with facial ticks, mental problems or just a plain ugliness. The themes are rich and deep, exploring so many aspects of human nature one loses count. The acting by seemingly first timers is first rate. It's reviewed mostly as a comedy but it's not laugh out loud kind of funny. Instead it's a satire on human nature, making one gulp with the truth of the telling. Take heed, don't watch this is you don't like squirming a little bit when faced with the naked truth. But if you're willing to invest yourself in this film, your time will not be for naught. It's not life changing but does make you think and most of all, feel.

The film is about a spoiled, racist brat surrounded by feckless, over-the-top incompetent adults. The adults are so beyond caricature in their incompetence that it utterly fails to be funny. It is ostensibly a black comedy, but the humour, for me at any rate, consistently fell flat. While it at least avoids the vulgarity of the very worst Hollywood comedies, they at least have the decency to be brief. This meanders pointlessly, with uninteresting subplots added seemingly for no reason other than padding. Also, jokes that weren't funny the first time are repeated again and again. Finally, none of the characters are particularly interesting nor sympathetic. For me, this quickly fell into "I don't care what happens to any of these people" and once that happens even murder utterly fails to be interesting.

This clearly wasn't my kind of movie and I only stuck with it based on a trusted reviewer's recommendation whom I would no longer completely trust if only I remembered just who that reviewer was.

This movie isn't completely unredeemable. There were moments of genuine laugh out loud comedy, but the reason you stick with the story is to see its conclusion, which either wasn't given or I was so done with the movie by the time it ended that I just didn't notice, but I have a feeling it's the former; and with how painfully slow and seemingly pointless the movie is, I wouldn't be surprised if the writer thought it was brilliant to have the story end without a conclusion because 'that's life, it's slow and there aren't always answers' but, assuming that was the intent, that's not why people see movies. Even the most out-there artistic movies still have an ending as to not lose an audience completely. Again, nothing against the people who made this movie. I clearly should've stopped 30 minutes in, but even though this movie's clearly not for me, not for most people (at one point I screamed, not in reaction to an offensive moment but successive, offensively boring ones, "this was on tv?! Who would watch this?! Well, tv is very different in other countries."), I find disturbing the seemingly unanimous critical praise. I don't trust Roger Ebert's website. Every time his site's review comes up in a movie's search, the review always seems backwards, praising terrible movies and being too critical of not-that-bad ones. He's dead, obviously. I'm saying whoever's writing in his name seems to have a very backwards view of culture, so his 4/4 rating was not at all surprising to me and his postmortem reviews carry no weight in my eyes. That being said, every other review seems to give this movie similar high praise. Were they watching the same movie? Did they really love every meandering, dialogue-free, action-free, progress-free moment? I find it very hard to believe that these reviewers would praise an equally abhorrently slow and pointless superhero movie.

And I wholeheartedly agree with another reviewer (here on imdb) who said this movie feels like it needs serious editing. It's not uncommon to hear of movies who's first cut was approaching 4 hours but was whittled down to 2.5, but I know the torturous pacing was deliberate, which makes me dislike it all the more. This movie feels like it was made to turn away people who wouldn't like or get it. Movies should be accessible. That's not to say cookie-cutter or inoffensive. I neither got nor liked Killing of a Sacred Deer and yet in a strange way that I struggle to put into words, I consider it a good movie in spite of (or perhaps because of) its going against everything I believe about filmmaking because it stuck with me. I didn't agree with how the story was told and I didn't get the larger point - the little of it I did I disagreed with - but it all felt purposeful. Maybe that's why Killing's offensiveness was magnetic whereas Quinquin's was repellent. Accessibility, at least for me, means a sense of purpose within and around the story. There was definitely (although with how slow everything else played out this seemed rushed) a smaller message or at least exploration of racism in France, but other than that I couldn't even sense a purpose out of my reach as with Killing. The only purpose I felt was, as I said above, the writer really liking to document the slowness, purposelessness, and imperfection of real life (that last one actually being a good thing, what gave the movie both uniqueness and life, but heavily weighed down by the first two). Beyond that I saw no purpose and that's what made this movie repellently different as opposed to magnetic.