Tag: funny

Notre Dame

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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The old cliché that no publicity is bad publicity certainly rings true with Notre Dame, the latest breezy comedy from French auteur Valérie Donzelli. She could’ve had no idea while making the film that ancient church’s roof would set ablaze on April 15, making her latest work something of an accidental bittersweet lament for the France’s most enduring symbol.

The burning down of the French cathedral was immediately seized upon as a symbol of the deterioration of France; another debilitating sign, along with Islamist terrorist attacks, the rise of far-right nationalism, the Church sex abuse scandals and the Gillet Jeunes protests, that this is a country slowly losing its way. And Notre Dame eerily captures this downbeat spirit, displaying a capital city and country uncertain of itself, paranoid and on edge. The French Open has been inexplicably cancelled, Lake Annecy has dried up, people randomly slap each other in metro stations, refugees sleep on the streets, and Paris is endlessly drenched by torrential rain. To rally spirits once again, the mayor calls for a “Grand competition for the Grand dame”, putting out an open call for a new esplanade design.

Our unlikely hero Maud Crayon (Valérie Donzelli herself) — built in the mode of Woody Allen’s early comic nebbishes — may be an architect but has little intention of entering the contest herself. She’s too busy paying off her debts, battling with her boss, trying to get her kids to school and finally kicking her ex-husband (although they haven’t signed the divorce papers) out of her flat. Then in a moment of sheer, unexplained magic, her design for a playground mysteriously floats out of her flat window all the way to the mayor’s office. The bold design is picked as a new way forward for the city and she’s instantly put in charge of the most important project in all of France.

Notre Dame

Given that the Notre-Dame itself took one hundred years to build, this premise would be enough conflict for an entire TV series, let alone a zippy ninety minute movie. But Maud’s travails don’t stop there. Firstly her ex-boyfriend (Pierre Deladonchamps) comes back as the journalist covering her story, secondly she finds out she’s pregnant, and thirdly she must contend with her ex-husband trying to win her back. Underscoring this theme, her daughter acutely asks her: “Why do women have to do everything?” To make matters worse, it turns out her design looks kinda like a phallus (the jokes aren’t subtle here), sparking outrage across the nation, and calls for construction to be indefinitely postponed.

France has a fine tradition of protesting its finest symbols. The construction of the Eiffel Tower was once petitioned against by writers as influential as Maupassant and Dumas. Likewise Mitterand’s Grands Projets was looked upon at the time as a sign of grandiosity. Yet now it would be hard to imagine the Paris skyline without the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre without its pyramid. The sheer absurdity of Crayon’s design is the point: showing through satire how even the most outlandish designs should be encouraged due to the way they can help establish and reinforce a city’s unique identity.

Yet if anyone is expecting a serious inquiry into the nature of architecture, they will be sorely displeased. Donzelli’s work is gleefully self-centred, neurotic and strange, casting herself in goofy, off-the-wall tales that make Amelie’s escapades look normal and well adjusted. Notre Dame has a childlike yet bawdy spirit, throwing in the entire kitchen sink, including musical interludes, silent movie homages, quick verbal barbs and politically incorrect sex jokes. Thankfully the movie, flawed as it may be, is inherently enjoyable, Donzelli’s bizarro charm proving infectious and her style strong enough to overcome any imperfections.

At the end of the day, its not really about the Notre-Dame at all, but a woman coming to terms with the chaos of her life, the power of great responsibility, and figuring out what’s actually important. It’s just ironic that Valérie Donzelli will be suddenly thrown into the spotlight due to an event completely out of her control. Talk about life imitating art!

International Sales are handled by Playtime. The film is scheduled for release in France only so far, on 18 December 2019.

This is no laughing matter!!!

Posted on by victorfraga

One of the greatest joys you can experience as a cinemagoer is settling into your seat at the local theatre to watch a film you’ve been looking forward to for weeks and weeks, only to realise 10 minutes in that what you’re watching is an hilarious, side-splitting farce of a film. A recent addition to the “unintentionally funny” category includes Tomas Alfredson’s shambolic The Snowman (2017), a film that audiences were excited to see considering its effective trailer and the talent involved in the production – as it turns out, it’s a laugh-out-loud pile of garbage. An “unintentionally funny movie” isn’t just a turkey or a cult film. It’s far worse than that. It’s so bad it’s good!

One of my own favourite cinema-going experiences was back in 2008, when a group of friends and I went to see M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (pictured below, in the iconic scene in which Mark Wahlberg talks to a plastic plant). The trailer had freaked us out, Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) had frightened us and blown our minds in equal measure (we were 15, give us a break!!!), and even the opening credits were suitably creepy. We thought we were in for something that would really scare us. Ten minutes later we were wiping away the tears rolling down our cheeks, howling with laughter at the way an old lady smashes through a windowpane with her face and a driverless lawn mower runs over a man’s head. The experience was one of utter joy.

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Reading against the text

The hilarity, though, was borne out of the fact that we thought we were going to see something that would terrify us but instead made us laugh. Had we known The Happening was going to be so bad, the experience would not have been the same. We would probably have laughed still, sure, but the ‘shock factor’ – that golden moment of realisation – would have been lost.

Many reviewers, however, particularly those on YouTube, recommend going to see unintentionally funny films by telling their audience to ‘watch it as a comedy.’ This, unfortunately, eliminates any potential golden moment of realisation. We shouldn’t tell people to view an “unintentionally funny film” as a comedy because the humour lies in that we think it’s actually going to be a scary, thrilling, or dramatic film, and then being let down. Big time. If we know it’s going to be funny-bad, we might laugh, but not nearly as hard, or as surprised, or most importantly as genuine as we might have done had we been blissfully unaware of the goldmine of hilarity we were about to stumble upon.

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Shhh, don’t tell anyone!!!

In a way, us fans of “unintentionally funny films” have an obligation not to ruin the surprise element of a film’s disastrous nature by saying, ‘it’s really bad, but watch it as a comedy and you’ll enjoy it.’ If we have to recommend a film, just to get a fellow film-lover to see something so bad they really shouldn’t miss it, tell them it’s really enjoyable (which isn’t a lie!), nudge them in the direction of the movie without giving the hysterical surprise away.

This is, admittedly, harder to do for classics of the genre like The Room (Tommy Wiseau, 2009; pictured above) or Samurai Cop (Amir Shervan, 1991; pictured at the top of this article), which are less known outside bad-film aficionado circles, but for new releases, those wonderful pieces of drivel inadvertently vying to join the ranks of Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000; pictured below), the Star Wars prequels, and most things starring Nicholas Cage, we can keep from ruining the surprise. Let people discover the unintentional comedy for themselves – that’s where the magic is.