By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 2 cats
Director: Gilles Deroo | Marianne Pistone
Country: france
Year: 2014
Running time: 100
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3103334/combined
Kyle says: “MOUTON is the nickname for the title character; the word means ‘Sheep.’ It could also be taken as a description of audience members (like me) who are willingly dragged to artistic slaughter. The members of the Selection Committee are regularly hoist by their own petard, as in the case of this program description: ‘…a lovely evocation of the pleasures and pain of small-town existence.’ Actually, it isn’t. It is mildly interesting to observe the day-to-day boredom of a small French town’s restaurant workers, focusing on the title character. But during a town celebration, an act of extreme violence that seems to result from a local man being sexually rejected changes everything, and the film descends into mind-numbing boredom. My heart soared like a hawk when it ended.
“Redemption came in the form of the Q & A with the two directors and their hapless translator, who seemed to comprehend sentence structure but not film grammar, and seemed to edit the blathering of the directors’ answers to slogans. Not that it would have mattered: The questions, answers, and translations seemed like a skit conceived by Woody Allen and/or Jean-Luc Godard. Before anyone can inquire about bad acting, we learn that there was no casting, that all the actors are not actors. The incessant smiling of the title character that seems to identify him as mentally challenged or badly directed is because the boy actually smiled all the time and was filmed that way. A question about the film being influenced by the great Béla Tarr’s THE TURIN HORSE is answered with the information that the film was completed before the directors saw the Tarr, only to then drone on and on pretentiously about how they actually were influenced by Tarr, if not by his HORSE. The one question unasked is whether the many filmic references to bloody meat and dead fish were metaphors for this dreary small town and its dreary denizens. 2 cats
“Seen Saturday, March 22, 2014, New Directors/New Films at the Walter Reade Theater, Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York.”