La Vie est à nous! (2005) - film review

In a small provincial town, Louise and her mother Blanche manage a roadside bar.  Their long-standing rival is Lucie, the owner of another bar.  On the day that Blanche buries her husband, she receives a young orphan boy.  Despite Louise’s best efforts, the boy remains locked up in his grief.  The next day, a mass of lorry drivers descends on the town, intending to block the road as part of a national strike.  Louise falls in love with one of the drivers, Pierre.

If it weren’t for its third rate script, this might have made a pretty respectable film.  Whilst not perfect, Gérard Krawczyk’s direction is noticeably more mature and thoughtful than in his two previous offerings in the risible Taxi series, and the cinematography is actually rather beautiful in places.  Unfortunately, the script is just so lamentably awful that you can’t take anything in the film seriously.  The muddled plot is full of half-developed ideas which become increasingly fanciful as the film progresses and the characterisation is virtually non-existent.   Even talented performers such as Sylvie Testud and Josiane Balasko struggle to make their characters convincing and are only half-successful.  Most of the cast – particularly Eric Cantona and Michel Muller – merely look as if they are uninvited guests on a film set, not sure why they are there or what they should be doing.  With its melange of forced humour, false emotion and over-baked sentimentality, the second half of the film is just too painful to watch.

© James Travers 2007

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