"Life Is Boring" -- Trailer

The unspeakable banality of recent film is of three kinds.

There is the sensationalism of American studio production and its derivatives in European (and alas, even Asian and Indian) film.

There is the stark cliché of the Bon-Bonne School, Wim Wenders meeting Robert Altman and kissing him fondly, especially in its Australian and Cambodian forms. (Do you listen, Peter Falk? Can you hear the beating of the drums, Ang Lee?)

Finally there is the French réactionnaire, the impressive and aggressive oeuvre of cinema vérite colliding with the surrealist theater.

This last school is of course boredom as art, ennui as interest, and angst as anti-catharsis. And at the apex of this genre stands the towering figure of Père Loutre, l'enfant terrible of the medium.

His latest work, opening tonight, is his most mature film, by far, and it is impossible to overpraise.

It would be bourgeois and Philistine to suggest that it is about anything, but it is about a man and time, a work laden with the saturated hum-drum of experience and the colossal weight of one's unimportant lack of interest in one's unimportance. It is unashamedly political (throughout the work a trash-can sits in one corner of a kitchen); it is sweeping in its denunciations of art that has gone before (there is a fly in the film). Loutre has never been one to let a chance for subtlety slip away, and with a running time of six hours and sixteen minutes, there are plenty of chances here: three, to be precise.

The mise-en scène is a kitchen in Paris, recalling older films ("A Kitchen In Paris," "Grasses of Paris," "Paris, A Kitchen, A Mango"). It recalls the still life tradition or the Flemish masters, of course, but refiltered through post-structuralist conventions themselves turned upside down to empty themselves of their own inexistence. The Fibonacci Clock on the wall calculates the compendium of experience as existential juggernaut.

One finds oneself smiling to oneself and thinking fondly of Barthes' early essays on wrestling, for instance, and fitting one's umbrella handle into one's nasal cavity to keep from weeping as hour after hour unfolds in a black-and-white prophecy: "We are all the man in the chair. The chair is the longer-abiding man in the chair, the room is empty, the game unfolds. There may be a fly in the room. There is not a fly in the room. There is a fly in the room." This last is of course a despairing allusion to the great English poets, especially Shakespeare in his Hamlet ("Enter Ghost," "Exit Ghost," "Enter Ghost," Exit Ghost").

During the film a series of cars go by in a Paris street. It took one four hours before one realized that the license plates recorded the moves in Kasparov's immortal chess game, and one finds oneself marveling at how significance collides with its own banality. Shakespeare again: is this a [chess game] that I see? It is. It is not. Ceci n'est pas un chess game! Non! Le triumphe! L'exaltation!

Jean Folette's cinematography persuades one that one is very drab.

Pauline Angeou's costuming will likely receive an award for its positive negation of both self and meaning. One feels that she sought to find a means of achieving the nude clothing so eagerly desired by the Rive Gauche neo-vorticist film-makers.

Of Loutre's own performance it can only be said that it reaches an apex of inexpressive negation and unwatchability that scoffs at the amateurish efforts of Vincent Gallo and Tom Cruise. It may be compared favorably to Kevin Costner's performance as the corpse in The Big Chill and Keanu Reeves' more energetic work.

In America, where tastes are more sensational, theaters in New York are giving away black sweaters to ticket buyers, and it is said that Disney is negotiating for the rights to make a 3-D version.

In Paris at last night's premiere, the audience left without applauding and painted the Latin Quarter black.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

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• trailer3

[birdsgotmyrocks]

this is so awesome

[AllieUnwind]

The high point, the very pinnacle of emotion, is the great and terrible sigh at 463:68. It leaves one breathless and heartbroken at the plight of this poor man. The emptiness of his life (and this film) is all represented by that sigh.

This will be the best worst film of the decade, perhaps of this generation. Watch it and weep.

[MissJeanette12]

This is carly!! Lol:)

[michaimeskinsek]

j'adore. Superbe.

I love. It's not cliché , it's real. French movies are like that. always shooted in a bedroom or in a kitchen with the bottle of wine on the table...Wonderful.

Il faudrait faire la même chose mais dans une chambre à coucher .

[Applemug]

LOL WHAT THE HECK

i can't stop laughing XD

[MultipleScrotum]

astonishing

[indigost7]

tick, tick, tick, tick, ......

Been there. Isn't Paris lovely in the spring!

-Marie

[BeccaNazgul]

How long did it take you to make this?

[hagiaeirene]

interesting.

[lindz1657]

So.....looks like you're smoking the grasses from Paris....