'Les Fameux Gars'

Chicken in the classroom, a stolen hot-air balloon, a makeshift Stephen Hawkins, wieners in a gun belt and some VIP's, very important português: you better hold on tight, because here comes the cinematic ride of the year. 

Adolf El Assal's Les Fameux Gars follows the adventure of three friends who embark on a school-trip to Portugal. When their friend Guy Désirée is barred from the school-trip on account of never having handed in one single paper, Stephen and his friends attempt to stage a sort of protest, which includes Stephen going on Léa Linster's cooking-show to make crèpes, in order to get permission for Guy Désirée to come along. Naturally, all fails and their friend must stay at home. Guy Désirée, on the other hand, has an enormous crush on their young teacher Miss Meyer (played by the fabulous Caty Baccega) and hires a shady private investigator to keep an eye on her, all the while planning on driving to Portugal himself.

In Portugal, and it must be said that this country seems to resemble Luxembourg in an almost uncanny way, things go from weird to absolutely absurd, as Stephen seems to carry 26 million Euros in his luggage, a teacher is shot with a rubber arrow, a building explodes in the most random fashion, a cat-and-mouse game with the police ensues and the friends steal a hot-air balloon only to plunge into a dream-like voyage which contains a less than subtle nod towards Méliès.

The plot contains more holes than a Swiss cheese. Clearly devised in a pub after several pints, the sequential build-up is of the most random nature and you can just imagine the writers having fun and shouting: 'Yeah, and you know what? Then they should steal a balloon and go on a Portuguese game-show...in a chicken suit!' Here's the thing about Les Famuex Gars, though: It shouldn't work, yet, it inexplicably does! 

What firmly holds this tapestry of absurdities together is the joyful hilarity of its genuinely funny moments. The tongue-in-cheek attitude towards its plot, its characters, the notion of national identity and last, but not least the self-reflexive awareness of film-making itself, infuse the film with a rare kind of raw energy, the likes of which Luxembourg cinema has not yet seen. The voice-over has the characters comment on their own actions on screen and take the piss out of each other. The film never pretends to be anything else than what it is, an accumulation of hilarious moments which, even if they make no sense whatsoever in an overall plot-related definition, nevertheless illustrate some truthful notions of what it means to live and be 'educated' in Luxembourg, Delvaux beware!

Some of the funniest instances present the characters imitating the pigeon French of the Luxembourger, the Portuguese and the African, all bound together in this language which none can claim as their own, thus symbolising the very life and cultural differences in the multiculturalism of Luxembourg life which a lot of its natives might choose to ignore. Even if the film does not preach tolerance and in fact stays away from all political statement, one might hope that the sheer absurd hilarity of it all might bring people from different cultural backgrounds closer, if only bound together in the hilarity of the frères Speck and '2 boule Mocca'.

Apart from presenting a crazed comedy of the nonsensical, Les Gars Fameux simultaneously works on a different level. Through its ironic and reflexive nods towards cinematic conventions, the film is out to show the middle-finger to the general stiffness of the filmic canon in Luxembourg and Europe in general. Through the introduction of cameos, such as Andy Bausch trying to steal El Assal's comedians and the aforementioned cinematic nod to Méliès, it almost seems as if this young film-maker allows us to see that he knows what he is doing, as if to show that he is aware of cinematic conventions and deliberately chooses to ignore them. This ironic filmic self-reflexivity culminates in the last scene, it might not quite be Truffaud's glance of the main protagonist towards the camera and by definition the audience, but it certainly brings awareness to the artificiality of story-telling and the comments of the characters about the film itself bring refusal to integrate the audience in a diegetic film-universe in which the illusion of the story must be maintained by all means. 

After the screening, one can imagine more than one spectator being a bit at a loss as to what to make of the film. Les Fameux Gars should and, indeed, must not be judged by conventional critical tools as, in the end, it is a hilariously absurd tour de force in which humour stands above all meaning and in this regard the film succeeds without a doubt!

'Carnage'

Polanski's latest release Carnage returns to themes, one cannot help but imagine being predominant in Polanski's mind, namely the themes of social confinement and an underlying brutality to a self-congratulatory notion of civility self-imposed by a modern society which proves itself to be more Hobbesian in nature than it would care to admit.

What starts as a somewhat stiff, but nevertheless polite settlement of a dispute of a children's fight, soon turns into a veritable battle of all against all. From the beginning the artificiality of civilization as a discourse is exposed over the petty quibble of the word 'armed' and the negative connotations it might involve. Things turn from bad to worse as the self-proclaimed liberal writer Penelope and her salesman husband Michael face the somewhat ritzier well-to-doers Nancy and Allen. Deliciously slow and with obvious glee, Polanski strips away layer after layer of his characters' personalities, a bit like evil onions, exposing a raw brutality inherent in this bourgeois way of life. As such, in this post-modern societal drama, culture is displayed in the form of coffee-table books, originality takes the form of adding pears to an apple cobbler and the ethically charged Gretchen-question reverts into a hamster-question as the unfortunate rodent is left to its own devices in the neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Hypocrisy rules the day and a breaking point is reached when Nancy has a very corporeal reaction to the Martha Stewart-like culinary efforts of Penelope. Throw in a bit of booze and some very phallic cigars and the bourgeois krakken is released. Between the four characters alliances are formed only to be broken and the viewer has the pleasure of seeing things degenerate from an 'we're all decent people' to a vehement 'Fuck you all'.

Carnage does at times feel fairly staged, being based on the play 'the god of carnage' by Yasmin Reza, however, the real time action and confinement to four walls only help to emphasize the claustrophobic set-up. The camera taking the point of view of a detached observer, almost like a perverse scientist dissecting the behavior of a species within its natural habitat. As such the camera becomes equivalent to the emotional tensions either isolating the characters in harsh close-ups smoothly binding them within the same frame. Even though masterfully done, one cannot help but feel that the smooth controlled cinematography stands in direct contrast to the depiction of carnage as a theme.

Being a character-study par excellence, Carnage's real asset lies in its performances as Foster plays Penelope with an up-tightness in which the strained veins on her forehead deserve at least as much acclaim as her acting skills, Reilly turns Michael from a loving parent into a raging Republican, Winslet plays Nancy with a beautiful shallowness which admittedly is literally turned inside out and Waltz delivers the best lines of the dialogue with a dry wit and honesty which are a delight to watch.

Ironically, Carnage has been acclaimed by exactly the middle-class bourgeois audience it exposes as fake. An audience which discusses the film in a civilized manner over a nice glass of Merlot and a bit of home-made hummus with fair-trade flat bread, all the while not realizing that it watched slightly distorted caricatures of itself for the last eighty minutes. All in all, while being hugely entertaining, the film ultimately presents half-developed truths while never bringing any theme to its conclusion. As such it presents nothing original, thus being a true product of the very thing it attacks, namely post-modern emptiness pervading all modern discourse. True Carnage this is not, an entertaining bicker for a pre-dinner audience more like it.