No other French director released more movies than Mocky :at the furious rate of two or three movies a year .That is not to say that he did not make an interesting effort now and then ; but many of them suffered from his lack of craft or the focus to develop his ideas .....
.....or even select well among them .
Another curate's egg. Thanks to an usually talented female cast(Virginie Le Doyen , Arielle Dombasle, Dominique Lavanant, Sylvie Testud) ,this one moves a definitive notch or two up the scale ; although it feels its usual quota of coarse jokes about sex and scatology , there's a welcome feeling of nostalgia, of fearing of getty old when your life is not really fulfilled .
The first sequence sets the tone:an old couple ,stuck in run-of -the -mill life : on Wednesday,it's the usual leek soup and you 'll get leek soup ; then the evening with the neighbors with small talk ;even for people in their sixties /seventies , parting is near.
Then they go their own way ; it was a brave movie on Mocky's part to face his old age (he was 84 in 2013),but his long wandering to find a new partner is inevitably uneven : an appearance by the lovely Le Doyen , Dombasle as a two-bit poetess reciting a bit of doggerel and who has found an -obvious- way to be independent of men after having been traumatized by an exhibitionist in a public garden ; Of course ,there are the usual flaws: the diner with a nymphomaniac Asian girl, the priest,the altar boys and the nun .But the fishing party ,with the intervention of a politician ,allows Mocky to settle his score with all the governments (he's anarchistic to the core).
Word to the wise : in his prime, Mocky was the star of a true masterpiece : "la tête contre les murs"(1959) by Georges Franju :a must for anyone interested in the French cinema .
