k_landsurvey

Imagine Michael Mann's 'Heat' crossed with Ken Loach's gritty northern England- and Scotland based social dramas, and you have an idea of what this film feels like - a heist film with thoroughly uncool, long-term dole recipients and other downtrodden working class folk as the perpetrators, instead of Robert DeNiro in post-modern Californian seafront diggings dashing from holdup to holdup... Lucas Belvaux brings together the disparate elements of the heist film and the anti-globalisation social commentary in fine style, though, and the story thoroughly engaged me. The elegiac, minimal soundtrack was perfectly deployed as well. Mr. Belvaux plays the hangdog career criminal better than almost anyone else, and no one plays quiet domestic desperation as well as Natacha Regnier, either... highly recommended!

I was surprised to see that no one had commented on this film yet, so I thought I'd put in my two centimes... This seemed to me one of those hyper-realist films by modern French directors who are at great pains to show that young people in France have nothing to say to each other. M. Kahn succeeded a bit too well, I'm afraid, and his sullen protagonist became especially irritating after a while... but Fabienne Babe is certainly nice to look at as well as being a fine actress, so she kept me in my seat & awake until the end of the film. Some attempt to explain the aforementioned sullen adolescent's bizarre behaviour and penchant for walking out on his trysts with Mlle. B. would have been nice as well - still, a not entirely uninteresting early work by one of France's best directors IMHO...

Definitely one of the oddest films I've seen in many a day... If you can imagine a woman who looks a great deal like Joan Rivers living in Lisbon in a house that she has redesigned as the White House and makes speeches about Manifest Destiny in Portuguese to her all-female staff (who prepare state banquets of fast food, including Kentucky Fried Chicken by the bucket)... well, if your imagination takes flights like that, then you'll be far less surprised by this movie than I was! The joke wore a little thin in the final reels, but it's nice to see such a fresh and whimsical view of things... I can't imagine anything like this being made even by an indie in the States. 2 1/2 stars out of 5, with an added half star for the originality of the concept, so 3...