Incredible but true , Film review

Incredible But True, film Review.

This film is French. I don’t mean it’s made in France. I don’t mean it’s in french. I don’t even mean that most of the actors are french and speak french and eat french. I mea, this is pure sitting on the sidewalk, onions around the neck, smoking a Gauloises, taking a break from the accordion, disparaging my lack of elan. Or it may be any reading of Cahier du cinema I have failed to grasp, as I lose my way amongst the arrondissements of Paris as this film mutters ‘le roast beef’ at me as I continue au gauche towards le metro. Hoping that a nice Highlander will light my way with a tubular lighting rig.

I know this because I studied cinema in France. It was the 90s, and we were in the E.U. I looked at Universite Paris X, in Nanterre aka…that place in ‘68 where they just set everything on fire. This film could just as quickly have been made then and, like many classics, has not aged a day.

We follow the later mid-life crisis of wanting a property of a petit bourgeois couple. Offering a complex with a unique selling point. It has a duct within it. You climb down it and will come out elsewhere in the house. While the journey down the ladder will seem relatively short to you…12 hours will have passed, but…you will be three days younger.

Aside from being three days younger, they live a cliched middle-class life right down to the slacker nature of the aging man-child husband and the anxious youth-fixated wife. We even have the classic social trend of the somewhat henpecked husband also having to have his overbearing boss over for dinner. A brute of a man who spells alpha in ALL CAPS. His trip to the unbelievable: he now has an electronic penis. Surgically implanted in Japan, and feels that everyone should have one.

Running at a brisque 74 minutes, our cast rarely deviates from the three, with a partial role for Robocock’s considerably younger partner. The film follows the follies of all involved with warm humor and a focus on the absurd. While the drive is comical, it is not so much Fluide Glacial as it is a canceled issue of Spirou for taking the lead too far.

The film is staunchly traditional, but I feel it is purposeful rather than incidental. The one brief scene involving gender other than the typical roles of men and women still amounts to an old man voyeur while two younger women kiss in a shop window. The way time slips away while the wife pursues youth, while the husband ages paying the mortgage leads to predictably tragic ends, but the journey and style gave elegance that captivates.

The magic in its most mundane creates weird chemistry in this film that is reminiscent of Being John Malkovich. The minor powers with significant repercussions set the tone of a movie as an essay. It is a short, sophomoric essay of pondering at some points but never ponderous as it maintains a lively, somewhat antiquated tone.

A great diversion and a fantastic way to spend an afternoon post-lunch glass of wine screening.

With some cheese.