Far too easy. From its not very subtle title (meaning the appearance of being a family), this film sets out its stall as a family-as-social-microcosm-style melodrama of the Nicholas Ray school. The material was originally a play, and its cramped theatrical origins suit the film's theme - the breakdown and paralysis of the family.
The action takes place in a family cafe - Au Pere Tranquille (here the father is dead - does the film lament the passing of patriarchy, tradition, order? These characters seem like squawking, entropic puppets who have lost their master). The decor of this family home/business is oppressive, dank, hostile (actively so - at one point the mother is injured); characters are continually framed to show their entrapment, and compared to trapped animals - a paralysed dog, a dying fly, tanked fish. Escape and epiphany are tantalisingly evoked only to be cruelly yanked away. Everyone is a failure/loser, even the seemingly prosperous. Bunuel's ghost hovers in the tale of a group of diners who cannot escape their surroundings. Crucially, these characters inhabit a class limbo - that dangerous extremist hunting-ground between lower and middle - that seems to account for their identity crises. Both 'happy' endings are heavily undermined. Everything happens exactly as you'd expect.
If ever a film showed the supremacy of the director over the writer in the cinema, it is this one. Alain Resnais used a play by the same writer/actors to create a quicksilver masterpiece, On Connait La Chanson, which was graceful, hilarious, moving, patterned, directed with the lightest of touches, yet profoundly sad and aware of the encroachment of time and death. This film is unworthy of the masters it alludes to: it is flatly directed, without insight; the dialogue (in translation, at any rate) is frequently banal; the characters are often hard to make out in the murky mise-en-scene, or are mere hectoring stereotypes, making redundant the so-called character study. Too many French films recently are working over this same old tired ground with increasingly little result. La Haine was supposed to have blown them all away.
(The subtitles are appalling, often unreadable).
The action takes place in a family cafe - Au Pere Tranquille (here the father is dead - does the film lament the passing of patriarchy, tradition, order? These characters seem like squawking, entropic puppets who have lost their master). The decor of this family home/business is oppressive, dank, hostile (actively so - at one point the mother is injured); characters are continually framed to show their entrapment, and compared to trapped animals - a paralysed dog, a dying fly, tanked fish. Escape and epiphany are tantalisingly evoked only to be cruelly yanked away. Everyone is a failure/loser, even the seemingly prosperous. Bunuel's ghost hovers in the tale of a group of diners who cannot escape their surroundings. Crucially, these characters inhabit a class limbo - that dangerous extremist hunting-ground between lower and middle - that seems to account for their identity crises. Both 'happy' endings are heavily undermined. Everything happens exactly as you'd expect.
If ever a film showed the supremacy of the director over the writer in the cinema, it is this one. Alain Resnais used a play by the same writer/actors to create a quicksilver masterpiece, On Connait La Chanson, which was graceful, hilarious, moving, patterned, directed with the lightest of touches, yet profoundly sad and aware of the encroachment of time and death. This film is unworthy of the masters it alludes to: it is flatly directed, without insight; the dialogue (in translation, at any rate) is frequently banal; the characters are often hard to make out in the murky mise-en-scene, or are mere hectoring stereotypes, making redundant the so-called character study. Too many French films recently are working over this same old tired ground with increasingly little result. La Haine was supposed to have blown them all away.
(The subtitles are appalling, often unreadable).