Don't Let Me Die on a Sunday

1 hour and half about death and only death. But I was hooked up since the first minute. Dark and poetic. Raw love and disgust at the same time. A boat drafting in the fog, since the day we are born, only hurting the ones that love us until we die. I saw it 22 years ago and I still remember it as one of the best movie I have seen.

I recently saw this film at the Second Annual NY S/M Film Festival.

The movie wrestles such topics as alternative sexuality, AIDS and death. Unfortunately, it wrestles these topics as only the French can do... Pretentious and boring. Even the scene in a French Leather Club just boggled my mind in how unrealistic it was. Everyone in this film seemed to be suffering from some major mental and emotional breakdown, and frankly, it was just a very depressing movie to watch.

This film deals with themes that are some kind of taboo for some people, but at the end I thought it was just another film dealing with people and their fear of life. It is a film that tries to represent how life works for someone who doesn´t care for it.

This might sound interesting, in a way it is, the pace the music makes along with the blue tone of the environment, makes it a peculiar expression of life at the edge. Ben a man who hates his own life is capable to give and save the life of others. A cynical but disturbing fact.

By the end I left the theater wondering what´ve I just saw, I can´t say that I loved it, but certainly didn´t hate it.

The picture is about using sexual deviation to cure tedium. Here is a group of people who are living boring lives so they are experimenting with sexual variation to give them a quick fix. This creates more impairment to these discontented people and as such the results are they become even more miserable. The end result is you get to share a "slice of life" with unhappy people having meaningless deviant sexual encounters with other unhappy people while looking for some substance in there lives. If this doesn't sound like a wonderful way to spend the evening, then I also agree.

The central character works in a morgue and some of his coworkers exchange girl friends/wives, watch home made pornography and contribute to the debasement of the women who love them. They spend the time in-between yelling at each other and feeling sorry for how miserable their lives are. The only time there is any warmth in the movie is when they are visiting their friend who is dying of AIDS. This subplot is suppose to give us some reference about life and death but it is overshadowed by the selfish behavior of the leading roles. Besides the main character who has three women who care for him and he treats them all with disdain there is a suicidal man and a lady who had died recently of a drug overdose but managed to come back to life. The main character introduced the other two into his world of S&M, general depravity but mostly humiliation. They seen to get along fine, as they are as screwed up as he is. The man keeps a book of all his sexual encounters as this is the meaning for his life and the girl is just a bored youth living on ecstasy and techno music. This movie is not about sexual obsession like Damage, Turkish Delight or even Last Tango in Paris it is about boredom, plain and not so simple. The result left me not caring about the main character, not caring what these people do and only feeling sorry for the female roles that are played with some feeling and sensitivity but not enough to save this movie from being lackluster and unmoving.

I generally like French films. I do recall that I liked Harrison's Flowers, which was also written by Didier Le Pêcheur. This one; not so much.

Maybe you think it is going somewhere despite the fact that Ben works in a morgue, and has the usual aberrant sexual habit that one would associate with that environment. Térésa comes in OD'd, nice looking, and you just figure Ben is going to do something. he comes out screaming with his pants down and you know what happened.

OK, his wife has had it. She puts up with his sadomasochism and orgies, but this is just over the top. But, hey, Térésa hangs around. What's up with that, girl? Ben is just letting people float by him like corpses. His life is just a mess, and he's so freaking depressed that he bums me out! I just couldn't handle it. The guy has not heart. You know that thing above your cock and to the left. Nothing there. Depressing. Never gets any better. Bummer.