Reviews

Although I'm a huge fan of Lelouch and have seen all of his films, this one was a huge disappointment. Yes I know, there are other rules when you are watching a Lelouch, that you have to see the world like a naive child does. Or like him at the time when he was a child and hidden in a cinema not to be discovered by the Nazis. But this time, nothing fits together. He wanted to create a big fresco, to tell the stories of the 20th century, about a modern woman, about his love of the cinema and about his 50 years of filmmaking. But everything is so overdone, horribly non credible, that it made me tremendously sad and angry. For example he used very much material of his past films, but a lot of it is dispensable and has almost no connection with the plot. All of the concentration camp scenes reached a level of pathos, kitsch and historical in-accurateness, that hasn't been there before even in his films. The peak was the scene where the prisoner was theatrically shot after singing the Charles Trenet song "Que reste-t-il de nos amours". A song that we here ad nauseam over and over again in the film, like the "Lily Marleen" song in Fassbinders film. Another problem is that you don't have any feelings towards the characters because everyone is a kind of cliché and their actions and relationships are badly written of seem only to be there to introduce the next big tracking shot. Even the good actors cannot change that fact. Lelouch wanted to tell us in this film about everything he loves or hates, but here he wasn't able to make fit all parts together. The only good thing in this film is Lelouchs way of filming and how he directs actors. He needs only two people in a room or a café in order to create wonderful, realistic scenes. But although I like his aphorisms very much, he certainly isn't a good screenwriter. In my personal opinion, Lelouch has always been good when he is short on money, like in his last, small and wonderful told film "Roman de Gare". He should concentrate an smaller films instead of trying to explain the universe. Because after all, even after this failure, I like the "Lelouch touch" and his ingenious and fresh way of filmmaking where anything can happen.