Cinematography:
Hugues PoulainComposer:
Gaëtan RousselCast:
Yolande Moreau, Bouli Lanners, Benoît Poelvoorde, Albert Dupontel, Mathieu Kassovitz, Philippe Katerine, Miss Ming, Pascal Rabaté, Francis Kuntz, Eric Martin (more)Plots(1)
The story begins in a small French village in Picardy, which is home to a factory packed full of working-class women making an honest living… well… that was until they arrive at work one morning to find the factory stripped bare of machinery. So with a pittance of a redundancy payout, the women decide to combine their monies to have something more significant. But what should they do with their newly acquired fortune? Purchase a pizza place? Commission anude calendar? Or hire a professional hitman to kill their deceptive former boss? (official distributor synopsis)
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Reviews (6)
What's the use of a dark script and satire that rots into the economic crisis, the US and much more, when what I enjoyed most about Louise-Michel was the way the film was made? Thanks to the excellent idea to shoot almost the entire film using static shots, it almost seems that we are watching a very bizarre theatre or a very, very strange reality-show (yes, much stranger than the "normal" ones) containing some really good passages. I'm thinking of the funereal prologue, the wandering between parked caravans or the final dance. But that's just three episodes, the rest didn't stand out to me. I can't say that I was bored by the adventures of Louis and Michel. They were just pretty weird, and most of the time I didn't know what to make of them. The first assassination was also literally disgusting and I almost turned it off.
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An undertaker loads an anonymous deceased person into a broken-down furnace in front of the bereaved. The national anthem is playing in the background. This scene has everything – the directors are the undertaker, a spectator is sitting amongst the survivors. Absurd cremation of taboo and correctness, fantastic acting and the sly style of Monty Python storytelling. I assume Francoise Rabelais would enjoy this farce, pissing on the head of the system with grace and a surreal passion for the nonsense of the mundane.
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“Buy, sell, buy, sell, buy, buy, sell, buy…” As an anarchistic comedy consisting in a crisis of excess with plebeian directness, Louise-Michel is plain (and profane) in its humour, yet post-modernistically glutted with motifs, which enable multiple interpretations by more attentive viewers (film historians will surely be pleased by the workers leaving the factory and the peeping through a keyhole, for example). Losing a job means losing certainties; in this case, that refers specifically to the film’s genre, the characters’ gender and what is and is not permissible in art today. Making fun of 9/11 and the killing of an infant. Who can beat that? With its style, in which comical scenes are filmed with a static camera, Louise-Michel has the most in common with slapstick, but its humour is much more cynical and far less predictable, and is sometimes based solely on where the camera is placed and how it moves (or doesn’t move). It is a unique film in how it provokes with every shot while remaining incredibly entertaining (i.e. it annoys viewers, but in a tolerable way). In that respect, it’s like Borat, compared to which it can get away with even more, because it is purely fictional. 85%
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A politically incorrect satire that, while smart and original presented, I found it almost completely unfunny, with the humour passing me by in most cases. There are a few amusing scenes and Benoit Poelvoorde, unfortunately in a supporting role, but excellent nonetheless. Grotesque satires are obviously not my cup of tea and I am used to a different kind of humour from the French. 55%
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The opening scene at the crematorium enticed me with its black humor, and the following minutes of the owner running out with his employees reminded me of a recently published case in Italy, where the boss sent his sheep on a company-wide vacation during which he relocated the factory to Poland. It seemed like a great ride and I expected to consider giving the highest rating, but after the disgruntled female employees voted for their boss's execution in the café, the film took a strange absurd turn that it couldn't shake off until the closing credits. While the first ten minutes suited me perfectly, endless moments of genuine suffering followed. I would have given in the Boo! rating but I realize that Jesus would define suffering completely differently. I just didn't connect with the anarchistic duo's style of humor. Overall impression: 15% for the intro.
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