Overrated

Not even bad in a good way

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

I actually bought this film. It really looked my cup of tea from everything I'd read about it. But I have to say that I found it really very dull. Much of the film is spent observing people going about their everyday business, with not really much thread of a story or build in the narrative, passion or even one thing having much consequence on anything else. I've read some comments that say the film is very poetic. I'm afraid to say, it's not my kind of poetry. It feels almost designed to make you feel bored, almost like you should suffer along with the rest of the people who live in the boring French village. In this way, I almost felt the director didn't care about the people who might be watching the film, almost like he's saying, "this life is so boring, you need to really FEEL the dull banality for yourself'. I also found the colours of the film very dark, so it was difficult to tell one character apart from another. This may just be my copy though. I have read many positive and fine reviews of this film, so perhaps I am just out of kilter with the rest of the world. But for me it was the film equivalent of being a bored teenager stuck in the house on a wet Sunday.

A quirky, amusing little film about a French factory worker attempting to get away from it all. The factory scenes at the beginning definitely show a strong Jacques Tati influence and the rest of the film is very much a French version of a Mike Leigh film. Like a lot of French films, plot is not particularly important, but the characters and the atmosphere just wash over you. My favourite characters were the cigarette smoking, sports car driving grandmother and the fat old man in the wheelchair, M. Albert. The scene where his carer pushed him down the hill in his wheelchair was hilarious! If you like gentle, atmospheric foreign films that don't really 'go' anywhere, then this one is for you.

The cinematography is very nice, with vivid shots of Venice and the french countryside, and the characters have the potential to be quite interesting. But the characters are about 80% developed to the point where we'd really care about them, and the whole thing doesn't tie together very well. Plus the pace is maddeningly slow. Message to the director: We get the point! It's hard for me to hate this film, but I can't rave about it either.

This movie tells the story of factory worker living somewhere in the French countryside. He has a wife and two kids who do not really love him, so one day he goes for a trip to Italy where he meets some buddies and drinks a lot. At the end he is coming back to his village. Thats about it, the story is sometimes interesting to follow as the characters are real, but it is also boring at times. Absolutely no movie for the typical blockbuster audience.