Film Review
Amid the throng of modern day Paris, a lone marginal figure struggles
to articulate his feelings of alienation from a world that is as hollow
as a politician's promises. He picks up a battered megaphone for
thirty euros but still cannot put into words what he feels he must
say. He gives the megaphone to a ranting lunatic he meets in the
street, amplifying the latter's incoherent diatribe so that it drowns
out the empty rhetoric from the candidates in France's 2012
presidential election... For anyone who has woken up to the
vacuity of modern life and is struggling to find anything deep or
meaningful within its gaudy cellophane wrapping director Jean-Marie
Villeneuve's first feature will have a profound resonance.
Tout est faux is neither a protest
film nor a cry of despair. It is an intensely lyrical, bleakly
comical commentary on the way we now live, as conditioned automata that
have all but lost the ability to think, to feel, to question and to
dream.
It's an auspicious debut for a director who so far has only a handful
of self-financed short films to his name. Villeneuve's
achievement is even more remarkable when you learn that he managed to
make the film on a derisory budget of 2000 euros (almost all of which
went on hiring essential expertise such as sound technicians). Most
of the crew (including the cast) offered their services for free and
virtually the entire film was shot in public locations without
permission (including a laundrette!). It's incredible to think
that for less than the cost of a second-hand car someone could make a
full-length film, and the fact that
Tout
est faux looks as if it had a million dollar budget (which is
what it would have cost if made in the conventional way) is a testament
not only to the extraordinary commitment of Villeneuve and his team,
but also to their ability. More importantly, it proves that
anyone with talent, enthusiasm and something worth saying can make a
film. It's good to know that cinema still manages to resist being
the sole preserve of the rich, well-connected and cynically
exploitative.
An outsider burning with something to say but lacking the means to do
so, Villeneuve closely resembles the central character in his film, a
solitary man in his 30s who leads a Kafkaesque-like existence in a
mostly non-descript Paris. Played by a likeably lugubrious
Frédéric Bayer Azem (his first major film role), the
anonymous Fred is in the throes of an existential crisis as he divides
his time between wandering aimlessly around Paris, meeting up with his
ambivalent girlfriend and performing an odd ritual in the pocket-sized
subterranean office where he works (his job consists of answering
telephone calls only with the words "Oui" and "D'accord" and making
random doodles on bits of paper).
Fred has immense difficulty engaging with any of the people around him
and their attempts to communicate with him just get swallowed up in the
background noise. It is as if he is afflicted with some kind of
autism. When his girlfriend begins dating another man (whose
hobbies include cutting articles out of newspapers in public places,
for no apparent reason other than to make him look like a deranged
psychopath), Fred goes cycling around Paris with an attractive girl he
met in a laundrette. He punches a gobby dealer who keeps
pestering him and gives half a cake he baked himself to a complete
stranger. These social encounters are like oases in a desert-like
existence of ennui and alienation and Fred's main preoccupation is the
meaningless of his existence, which can only be aggravated by Nicholas
Sarkozy's frequent appearances on television during the election
campaign.
There are echoes of George Lucas'
THX 1138 (1971) throughout the
film, with Fred bearing a striking similarity with the main male
protagonist in Lucas' film. Fred's awareness of the aridity of
his life makes him appear an alien in his own world, an impression that
is reinforced by some weirdly subjective camerawork and trippy
editing. For most of the film, Fred is shot from behind, the
camera almost pressed up against the back of his head as he traipses
around, magically flitting between a sun-dappled rural retreat and the
crowded streets of Paris after dark. The boundary between reality
and fantasy becomes increasingly indistinct as the film progresses, but
at the same time, Fred acquires a more tangible presence and he becomes
a kind of Messianic figure, bringing meaning not only into his own
life, but also into those he encounters, including his nauseating
dealer. "Look up into the sky and dream" - this is the message
Villeneuve drives home as he signs off his first film, and it is
unlikely to be the last we shall hear from him.
Tout est faux is an oddity and a
delight, one of the most inspired French films of 2014.
© James Travers 2014
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Film Synopsis
Fred is a man alone in Paris. Every day, he goes through the same
monotonous rituals at work. Then he wanders around the capital,
mentally sifting through the components which make up the world that
surrounds him. It is a world from which Fred feels increasingly
estranged and excluded, an urban wilderness, false and meaningless. Amidst the
grotesque charade that is the 2012 presidential election, everything strikes
him as a hollow sham. Tired of this barren reality, Fred sets about
creating his own alternative...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.