The minions of the moon

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Movie
German title The minions of the moon
Original title Les Favoris de la lune
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1984
length 105 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Otar Iosseliani
script
production Philippe Dussart
music Nicolas Zourabichvili
camera Philippe Théaudière
cut Dominique Bellfort
occupation
  • Pascal Aubier: Monsieur Laplace
  • Alix de Montaigu: Dolphins Laplace
  • Hans Peter Cloos: Monsieur Duphour-Paquet
  • Maïté Nahyr: Madeleine Duphour-Paquet
  • Jean-Pierre Beauviala: Colas
  • Mathieu Amalric : Julien
  • Katja Rupé : Claire
  • Bernard Eisenschitz: Gustave
  • François Michel: Philippe
  • Christiane Bailly: Agnès
  • Fanny Dupin: Rivière
  • László Szabó: a terrorist
  • Otar Iosseliani: a terrorist
  • Yannick Carpentier: a cop

and many others.

The favorites of the moon (Original title: Les Favoris de la lune ) is a film by Otar Iosseliani from 1984. It is Iosseliani's first film that he shot in France.

action

The prologue. The clothes of the actors and the aesthetics of some of the black and white photos suggest that we are at the end of the 19th century. We see the production and decoration of plates for a large porcelain service. And we see a painter and his model. He paints a nude portrait of the young woman.

The stories of the porcelain service and the painting run like two red threads through the film. In the course of the plot, more and more of the beautiful plates break and the painting becomes smaller and smaller. It is stolen several times - by the same thieves - and separated from the frame with a knife, so that in the end only the portrait of the young woman's head remains.

From the end of the 19th century - jump to Paris in the 1980s. We don't find out how the porcelain and how the painting got into the auction house, but we get to know their new owners, two of the protagonists of the subsequent film. The porcelain service was bought by Madame Laplace, the painting by Monsieur Duphour-Paquet. And what begins now has been called “a fun dance”, “a puzzle”, “a collage”. It is a web of many episodes that allow the characters to meet in ever new constellations, some of them close to reality (the owner of a gun shop also supplies one or the other terrorist group for a reasonable fee), some rather improbable (the clumsy policeman reminiscent of Jacques Tati, handcuffs can be made in a small mechanic's workshop).

Gustave, who runs the workshop, lives with Claire. But things don't seem to be going well between them. Claire has barely left the house in the morning when she gets into Monsieur Duphour-Paquet's car, in which he has already been waiting downstairs. - Madame Laplace appears in Gustave's workshop. She is wearing a thick fur coat and now does not fit into it at all. She tries to ensnare Gustave, but he doesn't want to hear anything more from her. She is a "lousy bitch" and she is promoted out. - Shortly afterwards, Gustave was speaking on the phone with her husband, Monsieur Laplace, the arms dealer. He made something for him: a remote control that you can use to detonate a bomb. - Claire works in a hair salon; her first customer that morning: Madame Laplace.

So it goes on with, as it would seem, countless encounters between the characters. Encounters between upper class citizens, thieves, police officers, prostitutes, a rock singer, a music teacher who sings the same song with his students as he later does with prison inmates, and others. - “Is that the story? To be honest, you can't summarize them or even remember them. ”- By the way, you can also see how Kafkaesque things go at a police station. The saddest fate overtakes Agnès, the prostitute with the big heart, when a terrorist takes cover behind her. The only winner in the whole story is an unnamed garbage man who finds an envelope with a huge bundle of banknotes left by the arms dealer Laplace in a bin.

The film title

The title of the film has its origins in Shakespeare's play Henry IV . Falstaff once said to Prince Henry: “Let not us, that are squires of the night's body, be called thieves of the day's beauty; Let us be - Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon. ”From this, Iosseliani, somewhat modified, made the French insert in the film:“ Pourquoi nous appelle-t-on les voleurs? Nous qui sommes les gardiens du corps de Diane dans les forêts; les chevaliers des ténèbres; les favoris de la lune. ”From which, in the subtitles, this translation into German became:“ Why do you call us thieves? We who are Diana's bodyguards in the woods, the knights of darkness, the favorites of the moon. "

Awards

Les Favoris de la lune was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival (Mostra internazionale d'arte cinematografica di Venezia) in 1984.

DVD

French original version and German dubbed version: Absolut Medien 2014. ISBN 978-3-8488-7008-0 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Film review in Variety , New York, August 30, 1984; German translation in: Catalog sheets of the 15th international forum of young films, Berlinale 1985.
  2. ^ Film review in L'Express , Paris, August 24, 1984; German translation in: Catalog sheets of the 15th international forum of young films, Berlinale 1985.
  3. Hellmuth Karasek , in: DER SPIEGEL , Hamburg, June 17, 1985-
  4. ^ Film review in L'Express , Paris, August 24, 1984; German translation in: Catalog sheets of the 15th international forum of young films, Berlinale 1985.