Les Passagers (1999) - film review

It is a day like any other.  Men and women make their way across Paris via the new tramway, silent in their thoughts but willing to tell us their stories.  A young man who is taking flowers to the grave of his former lover, a victim of AIDS, reflects on their last moments together.  Another young man is so obsessed with finding a woman with perfect feet that he ends up marrying one with an unpleasant face.  David, a school teacher, begins an amorous liaison with a an unemployed younger man, Marco, whilst Pierre, a security guard, is all too ready to give up his days of solitude when he meets the right woman.  Around them, society seems to be crumbling, the spread of AIDS reflecting a far deeper malaise in a world that has lost its way…

Les Passagers is a thought-provoking and hugely original film d’auteur from director and former film critic Jean-Claude Guiguet.  Through a series of inter-locking vignettes involving vulnerable men and women looking for love in an increasingly loveless world, the film makes some appropriate comments on the nature of our society.  Whilst not all of the observations are original, the poetic way in which Guiget makes his thesis certainly is.  Les Passagers is an odd but appealing mix of the overtly political and the intensely humanist – rather like a curious marriage of Godard and Truffaut.  (The connection with the latter is emphasised by Véronique Silver’s pesence as the film’s narrator, a role she had in Truffaut’s last but one film, La Femme d’à côté).

Among the diverse themes the film addresses are the random behaviour of the AIDS virus (which, unlike human beings, is totally non-discriminatory) and the destruction wrought by industries which are driven solely by the need to increase profits, not for the betterment of humanity.  A beautifully composed work, this is a film which accurately reflects a modern western society in which communities are fragmented, life is increasingly uncertain and people find it harder and harder to communicate with one another.

© James Travers 2004

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