First a MTV work,which channel 2 refused to broadcast -the cultural Channel Arte did it -, this Guédiguian movie was finally theatrically released.
It's not a comedy , the director said , it's a fable ,nothing is realistic. It's not even filmed on location ,only the façades are real ;and had it been realistic ,at the end of the film ,blood would have been shed.
This might be an optimistic counterbalance to the desperate "ki lo sa ", the ending of which ,the most desperate of all Guédiguian's movies told the viewer : "no use carrying on, class struggle is over ,so let' s call it quits ".
All the action but the sequence of the bank hold-up takes place in a cosmopolitan public housing project (estate)where emigrated people and others of French extraction cohabit in a world where drugs and aids run rampant (it was the early nineties and there still was no cure for this lethal desease) ; unemployment , poverty, and even desunity :an inhabitant draws a line which divides the "territory" in two : in an interview,the director said that ,when he was a child (born 1953) ,people would fight for their rights together ,the working class has become "the poor " ,it's the unions sundown.
The main character is a priest (the extraordinary Darroussin) who every morning finds syringes near his seedy "church" in sheet metal ;a realist ,he buys condoms and seringues for his flock .And when he sees all those armoured vans full of dough ,he realizes that the famous "give back to Caesar what is Caesar's " does not mean anything in a place where the only future is prison, unemployment, prostitution, or violence , thus he urges the underdogs to rebel.
It's something to hear Darroussin,Ariane Ascaride disguised as a nun and the children dressed up as well-mannered young bourgeois singing a canticle while heading for a hold up .
The events are depicted in voice over by the vicar ;it's only a fable .
It's not a comedy , the director said , it's a fable ,nothing is realistic. It's not even filmed on location ,only the façades are real ;and had it been realistic ,at the end of the film ,blood would have been shed.
This might be an optimistic counterbalance to the desperate "ki lo sa ", the ending of which ,the most desperate of all Guédiguian's movies told the viewer : "no use carrying on, class struggle is over ,so let' s call it quits ".
All the action but the sequence of the bank hold-up takes place in a cosmopolitan public housing project (estate)where emigrated people and others of French extraction cohabit in a world where drugs and aids run rampant (it was the early nineties and there still was no cure for this lethal desease) ; unemployment , poverty, and even desunity :an inhabitant draws a line which divides the "territory" in two : in an interview,the director said that ,when he was a child (born 1953) ,people would fight for their rights together ,the working class has become "the poor " ,it's the unions sundown.
The main character is a priest (the extraordinary Darroussin) who every morning finds syringes near his seedy "church" in sheet metal ;a realist ,he buys condoms and seringues for his flock .And when he sees all those armoured vans full of dough ,he realizes that the famous "give back to Caesar what is Caesar's " does not mean anything in a place where the only future is prison, unemployment, prostitution, or violence , thus he urges the underdogs to rebel.
It's something to hear Darroussin,Ariane Ascaride disguised as a nun and the children dressed up as well-mannered young bourgeois singing a canticle while heading for a hold up .
The events are depicted in voice over by the vicar ;it's only a fable .