Ville à vendre (1992) - film review

Moussin is a small derelict town in the industrial east of France where eight out of ten people are unemployed.  Whilst the town appears to be in a state of irreversible decline with virtually every house up for sale, the mood of the local population is upbeat, thanks to generous allowances handed out by the town’s mayor.   All is well until a prominent figure of the community, the pharmacist Delphine Martinet, dies in suspicious circumstances at a fête, shortly after hinting that she has secrets to reveal.  Martinet’s death intrigues an outsider, Orphée, who, not content with the official version of events, is prompted to carry out his own investigation.  In doing so he uncovers a dark and terrible secret.  But as the bodies pile up around him, will he ever live to tell the tale...?

Jean-Pierre Mocky assembles a remarkable cast (which reads like a potted Who’s Who of French cinema circa 1990) for his most virulent swipe at the kind of shady wholesale collusion of big business and governments that had become endemic in France (and most other countries) by the late 1980s.  A habitual self-plagiarist, Mocky has no qualms over plundering some of his earlier successes - notably La Grande frousse (1964) and Agent trouble (1987) - and revisits a scenario that will be familiar to all aficionados of The Wicker Man (1973) and the off-the-wall BBC TV series The League of Gentlemen (1999-2002).   A stranger (here aptly named Orphée) attempts to inveigle his way into a close-knit ensemble of grotesques (seemingly a job lot of rejects from the Hammer House of Horror) and is driven to unearth the sinister secret that lies at the badly decomposed heart of the community.  It’s not a film for the squeamish, nor for those who have a phobia of seriously bad hairstyles.

Mocky’s penchant for black comedy (noted for its in-your-face vulgarity and total lack of political correctness) and some wonderfully eccentric performances from an exceptional cast (comedienne par excellence Jacqueline Maillan is superb in her last film appearance) make up for a rambling plot which struggles to hold our interest much beyond the film’s wobbly midpoint.  Ville à vendre is not Mocky’s most subtle or polished film but its blunt caricature is not so far wide of the mark and, twenty years on, the film appears chillingly prophetic.  Most of the jokes are stale and predictable but Mocky’s portrayal of a town in a state of terminal decline, kept alive like a dying vampire with an intravenous feed of a highly dubious kind, provides a powerfully disturbing metaphor for where the industrialised countries of the West may be heading as their economic power and prosperity ebb slowly away towards the rest of the developing world - the zombification of a civilisation that has run its course but is too stubborn to lie down and die.

© James Travers 2011

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