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Louise-Michel - 9 July, NZ International Film Festival Preview
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- No no no not the French Anarchist Louise Michel who assisted in the championing of the social revolution in France, but rather a delightful quirky comedy that has done very well on the film festival circuit this year… awarded Best Screenplay at San Sebastian and a World Cinema Special Jury Prize for Originality at Sundance… though a revolutionary-class-driven-theme threads its way through the plot. The story begins in a small French village, Picardy, which is home to a toy-factory packed full of working-class women making an honest living… well… that was until they arrived at work one morning to find the factory stripped bare of machinery. So with a pittance of a redundancy, the women decide to merge their monies to make a significant combined-wealth BUT what should they do with their newly acquired fortune…?! purchase a pizza place…?! commission a nude calendar… ?! or hire a professional hit-man to kill their deceptive former boss…?!Well, the latter was the suggestion of Louise (Yolande Moreau), a mildly-retarded-illiterate-cross-dressing-ex-con named Jean Pierre, and surprisingly the bitter factory workers were unanimously in favour of this proposal. So with that, Louise sets out to organise the hit and stumbles across Michel (Bouli Lanners), a cross-dressing-trailer-park-security-guard named Cathy, and the agreement is secured.However, it soon transpires that Michel isn’t the professional hit-man he purported to be and commissions terminally-ill patients to undertake the assassinations. I pluralise assassination, because Louise and Michel soon realise the quaint factory is but one piece in a multinational corporation and so their quest for revenge results in numerous murders that span Picardy to Brussels and then to the tax-haven of Jersey. The film is borderline ridiculous, but this is what I loved about it, from a wheelchair-bound man getting hit by a bus to Michel’s bald-cancer-suffering-cousin shooting a cocktail-party goer at point-blank. Packed full of quirky humour, intrigue and absolute absurdity, it was an intelligent comedy that I thoroughly enjoyed. Louise-Michel was an unexpected treat. - Karyn See it in Wellington on the 17th and 19th of July.
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