Merci la vie (1991) - film review

One day, a shy teenager Camille comes across a young woman, Joëlle, lying in the middle of the road in a wedding dress.  Despite their different personalities – Camille is naive and sweet, Joëlle is wild and promiscuous – they strike up an instant friendship.  They embark on an orgy of seduction and destruction, humiliating men and smashing up cars.  Camille discovers that her friend’s behaviour stems from an earlier encounter with the unscrupulous Doctor Worms, who deliberately infected her with a sexually transmissible disease to further his own career.  Camille’s fears over her own health lead her to imagine herself in her parents’ past, where, with Joëlle’s help, she has to overcome extraordinary odds to bring about her own conception...

Artistically brilliant in its presentation but structurally an incoherent, self-indulgent muddle, Merci la vie is a film that has as many goods points as bad, and hence it is no small wonder that critics are divided as to its merit.  With its free form narrative which mingles real life and film-making, present and past, the film has no clear meaning, and its interpretation is left almost entirely to the spectator.  The film provides a definite ’experience’ but it is unlikely that any two spectators will agree on what that experience constitutes.  A great film or an abstract pile of tosh?

The film can be plausibly be viewed as an exploration of human sexuality, but in a rather allegorical, oblique way.  The naïve Camille and the man-mad Joëlle represent two facets of the same individual, who ultimately evolve into the sad and bitter middle-aged woman who is Camille’s mother (played brilliantly by Annie Girardot, one of the film’s unequivocal highlights).  The film’s bizarre final section, where our heroes flee from vicious Nazi officers and German troopers, can be interpreted as a parody of humanity’s innate guilt neurosis over sexuality, perhaps a modern re-relling of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve.  This is certainly a more satisfying interpretation than the more obvious allusion: that Nazi soldiers are a crude metaphor for AIDS, both undermining the pleasure of love-making.

Whilst this is unquestionably a hugely original piece of cinema, and should be regarded as one of Blier’s most important works, it is visibly marred by its excesses, including some nombrilisme of the worst kind.   Some of the visual effects appear over the top, and the narrative contains just too many half-developed ideas and incidental characters.   Lacking the clarity and focus of Blier’s previous (equally sophisticated) film Trop belle pour toi (1989), Merci la vie is not a comfortable or entirely satisfying film to watch.  However, few would dispute that this is the work of a creative genius, a bubbling maelstrom of anarchistic wit and wry, twisted humanity, offering us a desperately needed new style of cinema.

© James Travers 2002

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