Marketic
It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.
ScoobyMint
Disappointment for a huge fan!
FrogGlace
In other words,this film is a surreal ride.
AshUnow
This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
R. Ignacio Litardo
Any movie with such a cast deserves to be seen, and if directed and written by Pascal Bonizter, more so.Auteil plays the same character we've seen him in a thousand times. He's like a caricature version of his sublime "L'Adversaire" (same rural unsettling geography). Here we know this film's genre is something close to ... a vaudeville, like Beatrice tells him near the end. Not a drama. Not a comedy. Not a crime novel, thou it pretends to be so. Never a love story, thou love or at least lust and routine relationships abound (our hero has 4 women in about 2 days, 2 of them married to dangerous people he knows...). Béatrice is a woman that's so mad that anybody sound would flee from her, but her mixture of sadness and personality is intriguing. Although personally I found her "depressive hysteric" character rather predictable. I mean, every scene in which she was with Auteil (all, for we only see her as that) we know she's going to say something high sounding (she, not him as she accuses), then allure him, rebuke him, say something depressing, make something mad, and then start again...Jean Yanne is probably the more solid character of the movie. Yes, he plays the same poker faced small time villain we've seen at Bertrand's Je règle mon pas sur le pas de mon père (1999). But unlike his role at the already mentioned "Tenue c. e.", here there's no comic counterbalance. Just a grim manipulator. But that's fine for this movie in which you can hardly feel anything for anybody.Emmanuelle Devos's Gaëlle is an awkward character, detached when she even offers her young "rival" rouge, a smoke, coiffure and even some love tips, and then XIX century hysterical for a guy she's just met. Her matter of fact talk at the travel agency was fine, proving, again, she's a fine actress. The whole affaire with Pascale Bussières Mathilde is outright ridiculous. Nice underwear for a serious working woman, thou :). Ludivine Sagnier's Nathalie is fine as a nincompoop teen with some principles. It's funny she did the beauty at the bad remake of "Swimming Pool"(2003). Which, again, proves she can act.Summing up, a pity such a stellar cast and director made a film only worth watching. Hope next time they decide to make a film, not play with us. Chabrol would have done it better. This is a movie about a pathological lier, and nobody seems to care (but maybe for Gaelle). The political running joke, in which everybody pokes fun about his political beliefs and "le Mur" is lost to me.
snoozer1
The plot in Petites Coupures certainly left this viewer dumbfounded.***spoiler***In the space of 48hrs or so, Auteuil's character has an affair with a teenager, loses his wife's affections, attempts to seduce Scott Thomas, is rejected by her goes on to grope yet another female character in the back of a car and then is finally shot for his trouble.***end of spoiler***wha ???The only saving grace in this flick is Kristin Scott Thomas. Similar to Charlotte Rampling, she seems a *natural* to star in French cinema. My hope is that one day François Ozon may cast her in a part where she can show her true talent.There are some fine French films such as the remarkable Le Colonel Chabert begging for a DVD release, yet this is the tripe that gets chosen.Avoid this one.zzzz..
Fiona-39
This is, I think, meant to be a cold film - its summing up moment for me is when we have an extended close-up of Gaelle's ring on the ground in the snow, the white gradually darkening with the stain of Bruno's dark red blood. The camera simply watches the beauty of the movement, enjoys its aesthetic simplicity, and refuses to pan back to Bruno and let us witness his emotion and what is going on with him as he slowly bleeds. This is a deconstructed road movie; Bruno goes on a mission to deliver a message - a message whose sense we never learn, and whose effects ultimately seem irrelevant or minimal. Each trip in the car sees Bruno get involved with increasingly desperate sexual couplings, but there is no sense that these will progress anywhere. Indeed, it is noticeable that this film emphasises the way in which Bruno is in fact rejected at places that connote not travel as such, but the (unromanticised) stasis that travel also necessitates - in getting lost, at the airport, at the car park. Not so much on the road, then, as off the road - our lives here are not so much the American myth of untrammeled spaces, more full of constraint, difficulty and so on. The question repeated throughout the film in reference to Bruno's putative Communism, but what about the wall, becomes symbolic for me of the film's whole point. Neither sexual desire, nor 'love', nor ideology, can overcome the blocking 'wall', the stasis that haunts us. The cuts to Bruno's hand are perhaps the least disturbing thing in this beautiful, cold, bleak film.
ClaiClem
The distribution was good, the subject could have been interessant and comic. whereas, he described the wandering of an old non credible communist looking for loving sensations. Instead of this, the atmosphere is nor lively nor heavy.