Vive la France

The famous and most succesfull French screenwriter Michel Audiard delivers his own very personal view on the recent history of France.

It looks and feels like one of those zillion b&w TV documentaries on war and history but the comparison ends there. Audiard's view on recent French history proves rambling and incoherent but at the same time so politically incorrect it becomes great fun. Made in the mid-seventies, when you still could get away with all this, like his mourning on the disappearance of the famous "maison closes" (high-class bordello's), his total contempt for De Gaulle and the French army, his laconic view on Hitler and the Nazis (le fou attaque !) : it's crazy stuff. He produced, edited and narrated it all by himself. On release VLF was a total flop : almost no one saw it and Audiard went back to screenwriting. The documentary was almost completely forgotten until it was rediscovered on Youtube by a new generation and "Vive la France" now proves to be something of a small hit on the internet.