Louise-Michel

Currently in cinemas, the French film Seraphine caused a minor sensation when it swept this year’s Cesar awards, including winning the top actress trophy for Yolande Moreau’s remarkable portrayal of a rural housemaid driven to paint. Now local audiences have the chance to see another side to Moreau, better known in France for her comic roles, in this wickedly deadpan black comedy.

Here she again plays a simple, uneducated woman – her illiterate character’s spoken French is so bad that she can barely form sentences – with a performance that effortlessly dominates the film, but there the similarity ends.

This film was made before the Global Financial Crisis but appears to be almost predicting it. A group of women factory workers – including Moreau’s spectacularly glum and misanthropic Louise – have agreed to work harder and make financial sacrifices to keep the company going through hard times. None of this stops the owner from suddenly closing the plant one day without warning.

More conventional filmmakers might use this as the starting point for a political film about social justice, or a Fully Monty-like entertainment about the jobless pulling together in adversity. Not so Belgian filmmakers Gustave de Kervern and Benoit Delepine, who made the savagely hilarious men-in-wheelchairs comedy Aaltra a few years ago.

True, they take a decidedly political view here, best summed up as “capitalists are total bastards”, but their sensibility runs closer to nihilism and anarchy than the romance of the traditional Left (the film’s title is inspired by 19th century French anarchist named Louise Michel). To this end they draw on black humour, absurdity and a sense of deadpan that could almost rival that of Buster Keaton.
 
Thus when the workers meet to discuss pooling their redundancy money and the first suggestion is to make a nude calendar, Louise has a better idea. Why not pool their redundancy payouts to hire a hit man to kill the owner? Yes, they immediately agree, what a splendid idea! And so Louise seeks out a dishevelled and incompetent security man, Michel (Bouli Lanners), and takes to the road with him to make sure he performs the dirty deed.

Swedish director Roy Andersson’s wackily inspired You, the Living from last year gives a loose idea of de Kervern and Delepine’s fondness for stylisation. Unlike Andersson’s film, Louise-Michel does have a plot, though individual scenes don’t always service it. The film works via an accumulation of sketches that – at their best – could be viewed in isolation as miniatures of comic genius.

These scenes prove de Kervern and Delepine (who have their own TV comedy show) are masters of the visual gag in which the joke plays out in the far background of the shot. Think of a cow accidentally shot on a field adjoining a shooting range, or Louise walking out of her apartment block which only seconds afterwards is detonated by explosives.

Louise-Michel certainly isn’t flawless. Some gags are overly strained and at times it can be hard working out what’s going through the filmmakers’ heads (especially during the erratic and perplexing opening 15 minutes). But for lovers of the absurd, these faults will be easy to overlook. When the film works, which is more often than not, it’s both inspired and outrageously funny.