Le Skylab

A directing effort by French actress Julie Delpy. Set in the summer of 1979, the slender plot deals basically with her childhood memories, as the ten year old daughter of progressive parents going to Brittany for a family reunion.

One reason I was intrigued to see this movie is that I'm just a year older than Delpy and I remember the worldwide fears about the impending fall of the Skylab space station, from which the movie takes its title (despite the fears, it ended up crashing in an uninhabited part of the Australian desert). Delpy's parents as shown here (she plays her own mother), are, perhaps unintentionally, pretty obnoxious, post 1968 hippies belonging to the self righteous left and always ready to parade their moral superiority. They see themselves as super tolerant and yet they are willing to be totally judgmental toward those who do not share their beliefs. When the film has them argue politics with their conservative relatives (who are of course, portrayed as fat, ugly and vulgar), the couple is naturally given the best lines.

An amusing and risqué scene has Albertine, the young daughter (the alter ego of Delpy) going with her father to a nudist beach, and feeling very uncomfortable there, while her parent is totally blasé about the situation. Also with Bernadette Lafont, Emmanuelle Riva and Karin Viard, among others.