Other comments have compared the film with Tati- mistakenly, I think. Iosselani's whimsical surrealism derives from different traditions to Tati and has a grimmer view of life and people. The tone for this film is set by the apparently irrelevant opening scene where elderly men inspect a coffin-maker's produce and three of them begin to argue over which is entitled to one particular coffin. It is characteristic of Iosselani that Michel Piccoli, the best known actor in the film, plays the hero's mother. This is a world where a cheetah is part of a government ministry's inventory and a modern apartment has a secret passage leading to another hidden apartment, where people have fathers or mothers but not both, where coincidences happen that only we spectators know about. Vincent- characteristically again, it is only half an hour into the film, when he loses his job, that we learn his name- is a minster for unspecified matters- something to do with animals and foreign affairs in a French government. He is bored with his job and when popular unrest- we never learn what he has done to annoy people- leads to his dismissal he is happy to go, abandoning his official residence and his maitresse-en-titre to his assistant and his department to his successor, who is also dependent on his mother's advice and whose main concern seems to be the concierge's uniform. Vincent happily makes contact with his ex-fiancée and former mistresses, sets about acquiring new mistresses, drinks to excess, starts playing music again- in short begins to find himself. There are undoubtedly personal elements in the film- Vincent's friends include Georgian Orthodox priests- real or pretend, his apartment is squatted by Africans, the bistro where he and his friends drink is taken over by an African who says of the Pirosmani-like drawings on the wall made by a Georgian pavement-artist- again like Pirosmani, in exchange for drinks- "Paint it all over. I don't want to see any of that crap." Eventually his successor too loses his post and turns up in the park owned by Vincent's mother where Vincent helps in the garden and in a scene identical with Vincent's first appearance there they exchange rings and cigarettes and then go to an alfresco feast. The camera pans back over green trees and gazes at the sky. The early surrealists were angry and enraged, with Iosselani surrealism is a wry, amused acceptance of the inevitable and a recognition of the transitoriness and futility of everything and that things are still worth doing for all that.
Review of Jardins en automne
