Les Gens normaux n’ont rien d’exceptionnel (1993) - film review

Martine is trying to rebuild her life after separating from her boyfriend François, but the pressures of her job and her turbulent relationship with her new boyfriend finally push her over the edge.  After a chance encounter with François she goes berserk and smashes a shop window with her head.  She ends up in a psychiatric hospital where she meets people whose love lives are more tragic than her own.  Most moving is the story of Anne, a withdrawn young woman, whose only souvenir is a passport photograph of a young man named German.  Determined to reunite Anne with her former lover, Martine pays German an impromptu visit, only to discover that he has never heard of Anne...

In her first directoral work, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa offers this extraordinary tongue-in-cheek portrayal of mental collapse and recovery, a subject which is rarely broached by cinema, and seldom treated with the conviction and good humour that we see in this film.   Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s class-A performance of a young woman who literally loses her mind makes this a powerful and memorable work, which is made all the more entertaining by its intermittent touches of acerbic comedy.

Although Tedeschi’s presence dominates the film (since, from the sombre opening sequences we are conditioned to see the world through her eyes), the supporting characters are also well-drawn and believable, including some particularly poignant portrayals of mentally disturbed young people.  Whilst clearly intended to be a comedy, the film manages to avoid demeaning its subject, but rather threats it with the honesty and sensitivity it deserves (without feeling the need to pander to some misguided notion of political correctness).   Indeed the film goes some way towards diminishing the stigma which still surrounds the issue of mental illness and should be regarded as an important work if only for its relevance to contemporary society.

The film’s impact stems not from its dialogue (which is used sparsely and delivered rather mutedly as if all the characters found speaking a genuine ordeal) but from its absence of dialogue, from the sober way in which the characters are seen to interact and meditate on their own predicaments.  The everyday world, inhabited by "normal" people, is photographed in a subtly different way to the psychiatric hospital, emphasising the soulless brutality of the former and the cruel fragility of the latter.  This contrast is emphasised by the characters who inhabit the two worlds – who initially appear to conform to stereotypical norms until their similarities are gradually revealed and their differences shown to be purely illusory.

The curious dichotomy which the film shows us is most apparent in Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s character.  The unfathomable Martine appears to straddle two worlds – one inhabited by those with psychological disorders of varying degrees of severity, the other inhabited by "normal people" who believe they are in control of their lives.  We are never sure at which point Martine crosses over from one world to the other, indeed if she ever makes the transition at all, but the one thing which is shown, through her experiences, is the extent to which the two worlds overlap.  The same thoughts could apply equally to the character played by the excellent Melvil Poupaud – who is sufficiently ambiguous and equally at ease in both worlds that we can never be sure whether he is any more or less mentally unstable than Martine.  To a lesser extent, we see this reflected in every character in the film, leading us to conclude: is there really such a thing as a “normal person”?

© James Travers 2003

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