C'est la vie - that's how we are, that's life

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title C'est la vie - that's how we are, that's life
Original title Le premier jour du reste de ta vie
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 2008
length 114 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Rémi Bezançon
script Rémi Bezançon
production Eric Altmeyer , Nicolas Altmeyer
music Sinclair
camera Antoine Monod
cut Sophie Reine
occupation

C'est la vie - This is how we are, this is life (original title: Le premier jour du reste de ta vie , German: "The first day of the rest of your life") is a feature film by the French director Rémi Bezançon from 2008. The tragic comedy , for which Bezançon also wrote the screenplay, uses five exemplary days to report on the life of a family of five from the French middle class over a period of almost twelve years. The film was produced by the French production company Mandarin Films in collaboration with Canal + and France 2 , among others . Le premier jour du reste de ta vie developed into an audience success in France, was praised by critics for its unconventional narrative attitude and music and followed a series of similar productions in French cinema.

History of origin

Although the film is not autobiographical, director Rémi Bezançon said he wanted to pay homage to his family with C'est la Vie . He himself grew up with three older brothers and one younger sister. He had already addressed the topic of family in his previous first feature film, Love Is in the Air (2005) and several short films.

The first draft of the script originally featured four children, but Bezançon deleted one character, the one closest to him, in order to focus the plot. He built into the figure of Fleur many problems that preoccupied him even during puberty, when he found it difficult to put himself in the mother's shoes and write her story. He wanted to make the family universal, which is why the film does not show the city in which the film is set. The star-shaped narrative construction, which reproduces the decisive day in the life of every family member, came to him while he was working on the film script. “Each of the five days corresponds with one of the family members and follows him or her from morning to evening,” says Bezançon. The visual language was adapted to the narrative construction, and cameraman Antoine Monod developed his own visual language adapted to the respective character. He shot the first episode about Albert with a wide-angle lens to emphasize the distance between the characters, while for the episode of Fleur he used a handheld camera. For Raphael found a tripod use. Zabou Breitman as Marie-Jeanne was shot against a blurry background, while Robert worked with a high-contrast light in the style of Edward Hopper's works . “It was about using the camera to clarify the inner workings of the respective person who is currently the focus of attention,” says Bezançon. He saw the passing of time as an important topic for himself and reinforced it with specially created Super 8 films and numerous flashbacks .

For the original title, Bezançon was originally inspired by a line of dialogue from Sam Mendes ' Oscar- winning film American Beauty (1999). After finishing the script, his producer Isabelle Grellat made him aware of the song Le premier jour by Étienne Daho , after which he used it for his film.

Sinclair (real name: Mathieu Blanc-Francard) was won as the composer for the film. Before shooting began, he received the film script so that he could work within a year on the connection of the songs that Rémi Bezançon had selected - including Summertime by Janis Joplin and Time by David Bowie  - and adapted them for the final film version. “I lock myself in my studio with the pictures that Rémi has spun for me and do my little thing,” says Sinclair. Bezançon wanted to make a film with a lot of music, which is why he used a lot of songs that are supposed to arouse memories and feelings in the viewer.

Beside the well-known actors Jacques Gamblin , Zabou Breitman , Déborah François and Marc-André Grondin , Bezançon engaged the young and inexperienced theater actor Pio Marmaï in the role of Albert. According to his own statements, the director was looking for a fresh face for the part. Some critics should later point out the external similarity between Marmaï and Vincent Elbaz . Elbaz had played the male lead in Bezançon's previous feature film Ma vie en l'air .

action

The inexperienced theater actor Pio Marmaï plays the eldest son Albert.
The actress and director Zabou Breitman can be seen as a mother.
The French actor Jacques Gamblin plays Robert Duval.

The film is divided into five chapters, each focusing on the life of a family member. It begins with a collage of video recordings and pictures of the family that convey happiness and exuberance.

Wednesday, August 24, 1988 - A dog's life

The taxi driver Robert Duval lives with his wife Marie-Jeanne and their children Albert, Raphaël ("Raph") and 10-year-old Fleur in a single-family house in the suburbs financed by their grandfather. The family employs Albert's ailing dog. Medical student Albert advises euthanasia, the rest of the family are against it. After an argument, Albert prevails and later buries his dog in the family garden. A short time later, Albert moves out of his parents' house and receives a free apartment in the apartment building of his eccentric grandfather Pierre. During the move, Albert advises his father, who suffers from nicotine addiction, to use nicotine patches. At the same time, Robert Duval has to suffer from his father. Every time he meets, he makes him feel that he has not met expectations. After the nicotine patches do not have the hoped-for effect, his father wishes him a decent cancer , this is the only way Robert could stop smoking.

After her son moved out, Marie-Jeanne began studying again. She enrolls in the fine arts and later takes the same courses as her son Raphaël. He lets his studies slide. Meanwhile, Albert makes the acquaintance of the alternative student Prune in his new apartment.

Friday 3rd December 1993 - Blood ties

Fleur has grown into a rebellious teenager with a penchant for the grunge style. She has her first sexual experience with the older classmate and hobby singer Sacha and experiments with drugs. After she lost her innocence to Sacha, Sacha doesn't want to know anything more from her. At the same time, Fleur's family forgets their 16th birthday. As a result, over dinner with the grandfather, the family members quarrel. Robert accuses his father, among other things, of never paying attention to him and not even keeping pictures of him. Meanwhile, the responsible Raph impresses his grandfather, a former winemaker, at the wine tasting and from now on receives the key to his wine store in his parents' cellar. Albert takes care of his disappointed sister and confronts Sacha. At a party where Albert and Raph take their little sister with them for entertainment, an argument breaks out when Robert does not show up at the agreed time to pick up Fleur. In the scuffle, Albert bleeds his brother's nose and calls him a failure. Albert and Prune get closer later.

Saturday June 22, 1996 - Magic Fingers

Stunned by drugs, Raphaël only lives in the daytime. The only constant in his life are the weekly meetings with his grandfather Pierre, who teaches him the art of wine tasting. The widower lets him in on his own past and needs and compares his apartment with a kind of time machine. Raph then returns to his parents' house on the day of his brother's wedding and prepares his old room. He looks back on an air guitar competition to which his father had accompanied him in the fall of 1989. There he met the attractive participant Moïra, who secretly gave him her phone number. After his successful appearance as "Magic Fingers", however, Raph loses the slip of paper with the number. After almost nine years, he thinks he can remember the correct phone number and speaks to the supposed guitar teacher on the answering machine. However, he is wrong in the number.

After the civil marriage between Albert and Prune, the Duvals learn that grandfather Pierre has died. While Robert and his son Raph are campaigning for the further wedding celebrations to be canceled, Albert, Prune and mother Marie-Jeanne are against a postponement. This leads to a break between Albert and his family. Father Robert later finds out, while filling out the death form, that his father kept pictures of him in his wallet.

Friday, September 25, 1998 - When the earth rotates, you rotate with it

Marie-Jeanne is still dedicated to art and experiments with photography. She complains about the repeated absence of her daughter, who like Raph still lives with her family. After Fleur's been away for two days, her mother tidies her room. Marie-Jeanne comes across her daughter's diary. She breaks open the lock and learns about the enthusiasm, worries and needs of Fleur from the age of 10 until today. In her diary she reports about her first sex - "the first day of the rest of her life". Marie-Jeanne also learns about anonymous sex and an abortion Fleurs.

At the same time, Marie-Jeanne begins to feel less attractive as she gets older. She no longer has sex with Robert. A conversation with a weed stranger confirms her doubts about herself. In the following driving test, the insecure Marie-Jeanne runs into a dog whose 70-year-old grieving owner makes her susceptible to cosmetic surgery. Marie-Jeanne then visits the doctor's office of her son Albert, who has established himself as a cosmetic surgeon, and asks him for a breast augmentation. Albert tries to dispel his mother's self-doubts as she longs for the old days when her husband loved her and her children were young. She then confronts her son Raphaël, who still lives aimlessly at home with his parents. In the evening she meets with her driving instructor for dinner, but despite advances she doesn't go any further.

After returning home to her husband, Marie-Jeanne is confronted by her daughter with the opened diary. Fleur leaves the parental home after a brief but heated argument. Her mother tries to follow her in her father's taxi, but causes a car accident and is easily injured. The accident welds the family back together. From now on Raphaël tries to make something of his life, while Robert discovers a message slipped to Marie-Jeanne by the driving instructor.

Friday, May 26, 2000 - Our Father

Robert tries to quit smoking. At the same time he leads a harmonious family life with Marie-Jeanne. Fleur has developed into a responsible, young student and advises her father to stop driving a taxi. On one of Robert's trips, his son Albert gets into a taxi. Without first recognizing his father, he talks openly about his problematic marriage to Prune. The two then meet with Raphaël in a restaurant. The Duvals' youngest son has since moved out and works as a sommelier . Robert and his sons get drunk. The father tells his sons about a youthful sin when, out of enthusiasm for a classmate, he sent a tuft of his pubic hair and slipped this on a classmate. This was then expelled from school, but is married to Robert's childhood sweetheart, as he and his sons discover at the next opportunity. Then he drives with Albert and Raphaël to a formative place of his childhood, a ditch in the forest that he doesn't dare to jump over as an adult.

In the evening, the family meets to eat together. The mood is exuberant. Fleur gives her father an inflatable pillow that is supposed to protect his back when taking a taxi. When Marie-Jeanne asked about grandchildren, Albert, Raphaël and Fleur evade. Albert smirks that they decided to skip a generation, whereupon their father speaks emotionally about the importance of the family and how much it meant to him to see his children grow up. Later Robert and Marie-Jeanne retreat to the taxi in the garden, where Robert tries out his present. He tells his wife about the day and tells her about a doctor's visit and his cancer.

Robert dies four months later. Fleur has since started a relationship with Albert and Raph's childhood friend Eric. Albert has given up his practice and works as a doctor in the emergency room of a hospital. Marie-Jeanne and her children scatter their father's ashes on a beach where they used to spend their holidays together. You remember that time through old Super 8 films. Later Marie-Jeanne sits down in her deceased husband's taxi and lets his breath rise from the inflatable pillow into her nose. Meanwhile, Fleur makes the joyful discovery that she is pregnant.

Reviews and aftermath

Rémi Bezançon at the Paris premiere of his film, July 2008

France

The film premiered on June 13, 2008 at the Cabourg Film Festival and opened regularly in French cinemas on July 23, 2008. C'est la vie developed into a popular success there and reached almost 1.2 million viewers. In addition to a rich soundtrack, Jacques Mandelbaum ( Le Monde ) noted that the movie's originality lies mainly in its distorted narrative style. The fragmentary and confusing structure made the narrative much smoother, also due to the high quality script, which is closely watching and has a fine writing style. Never lose sight of the other characters in the script. Of course, the work has its limits, and some features are close to the cliché, for example the leveling of feelings and events. L'Indépendant judged the film to be a pleasant family comedy and pointed out the promising and little-known young actors who brought “energy and freshness” into the film. "Pio Marmaï shows real charisma in his first role, while Déborah François [...] confirms her talent from the last two films."

After the successful release of C'est la vie and Arnaud Desplechin's Un conte de Noël in 2008, Christophe Carrière believed that a year later he saw a trend towards family comedy in French cinema. He included:

Such films have always existed, but they now exuded a good mood. "A social and political paradox in times of financial crisis," said Carrière. On the other hand, the opinion of the sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann, who in times of doubt names the family as the first place of refuge, takes precedence over friendship. “But today's family system is based on a contradiction: while having grown in a culture of independence, legacy of individual assertion of the 1970s, you want to live with everyone. Hence the constant friction. The authors are therefore forced to inject humor and soften their words if they do not want to drown in pathos, ”said Kaufmann. For the sociologist Emmanuel Ethis, C'est la vie has meanwhile become “a symbol that shapes the generation and has created a connection between individuals. The film created a dialogue that had completely disappeared from French cinema, ”said Ethis, pointing out the relationship between Raphaël and his grandfather, which was more successful than any government campaign for the elderly.

Eric Altmeyer, producer of C'est la vie , noted that the niche in the market is now being filled by French television, which has reduced sales of C'est la vie abroad.

German-speaking area

In Germany, the film was released in cinemas on April 23, 2009, and on May 8, 2009 in Austria. Similar to France, C'est la vie received mostly positive reviews from critics and was perceived as a light family comedy with good actors. However, there was no great financial success in German-speaking countries. Bezançon pointed out in an interview with the Münchener Abendzeitung that France, along with Italy and the Romance countries, viewed the family as the center of life. He suspected that German families were more burdened by history and that this would make it more difficult to live together.

Andrea Dittgen ( film-dienst ) praised C'est la vie for its "stunning naturalness" and pointed out that in Germany the combination of people and events would probably only have been enough for a mediocre television film. Dittgen praised the nested narrative structure, the actors, the music, the carefully reproduced zeitgeist and the dialogues between the characters, which left the viewer with an "unfamiliar familiarity and intimacy". The film comes close to the quality of the much more political Italian film The Best Years by Marco Tullio Giordana . On the edge, she criticized the bad habit of not translating French titles, but rather "translating them into German with fake bonds".

According to Gerhard Midding ( Berliner Zeitung ) , the film in France benefited above all from word of mouth and was "skilfully and lovingly" constructed by Bezançon. The leitmotif of each episode is "the replacement". Disasters and joys alternate according to a “dramaturgy of balance”, the family as an institution appears fragile and vulnerable without ever questioning its resilience. Midding also praised the actors who would “wear the film wonderfully”. Martina Scheffler ( Der Tagesspiegel ) also recognized the transience of life as the “hyper-present subject” of the film and praised Bezançon for not getting lost in a “general store of cheap feelings” and for respecting his characters. However, Scheffler criticized the end of the film. It suggests that “nothing can be tied to lost threads for me, nothing to you, and that one can simply cheat time”.

Stylistically, the "rousing (e) and touching (e)" film has a "symphonic character", says Patrick Seyboth ( epd film ). The abundance of storylines was sometimes a bit breathless or clichéd, but it would represent minor weaknesses. Bezançon would take his characters seriously at any time, while some songs would cut scenes out of the flow of time and transfer them into poetry.

The standard pointed out that it was difficult to avoid the director's "balanced, often comfortably sentimental view" of his characters.

Awards

Rémi Bezançon was awarded the Étoile d'Or for his script in 2009 . At the Césars , France's most important film award, C'est la vie was recognized with nine nominations alongside the thriller Mesrine (10 nominations; published in German-speaking countries under the titles Public Enemy No. 1 - Mordinstinkt and Public Enemy No. 1 - Death Instinct ) , Martin Provost's film biography Séraphine and Arnaud Desplechin's tragic comedy Un conte de Noël (nine nominations each) as co-favorites. While Séraphine prevailed over C'est la vie as the best French film of the last cinema year , Bezançon's directorial work won three awards: Déborah François and Marc-André Grondin were honored as best young actors, while film editor Sophie Rein received an award for editing. The film was also nominated in the categories of Best Director, Best Actor (Jacques Gamblin), Film Music (Sinclair), Original Screenplay and Young Actor (Pio Marmaï).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for C'est la vie - This is how we are, this is life . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , March 2009 (PDF; test number: 117 373 K).
  2. ↑ a b c Interview with Rémi Bezançon ( Memento of the original from February 28, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the official German language website for the film (accessed on February 14, 2010)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.cestlavie.kinowelt.de
  3. ↑ a b c d [ My family, your family ] at fluter.de, April 23, 2009 (accessed on February 19, 2010)
  4. ↑ Christophe Carrière: Sinclair fait sa BO . In: L'Express , February 7, 2008, No. 2953, p. 110
  5. ↑ Profile at lumiere.obs.coe.int (accessed on February 14, 2010)
  6. ^ Jacques Mandelbaum: Douze ans, cinq jours, une famille . In: Le Monde , July 23, 2008, p. 20
  7. ↑ Le premier jour du reste de ta vie . In: L'Indépendant , July 23, 2008 (accessed on January 14, 2010 via LexisNexis Wirtschaft )
  8. ↑ a b Christophe Carrière: Des familles en or . In: L'Express , June 18, 2009, p. 112
  9. ↑ Long live the neurosis! at Abendzeitung.de, April 21, 2009; Interview with Adrian Prechtel; accessed January 9, 2018
  10. ↑ Andrea Dittgen: Review in film-dienst 9/2009 (accessed on February 19, 2010 via Munzinger Online )
  11. ↑ Gerhard Midding: My mother has a long focal length . In: Berliner Zeitung , April 23, 2009
  12. ↑ Martina Scheffler: It is what it is . In: Der Tagesspiegel , April 23, 2009, p. 27
  13. ↑ Patrick Seyboth: C'est la vie - That's how we are, that's life . In: epd Film 4/2009 (accessed on December 16, 2014)
  14. ↑ Father plays the best air guitar at derstandard.at, May 6, 2009 (accessed on February 19, 2010)