Review of L'enfer

L'enfer (2005)
8/10
Enjoyable, worth watching, but not fun...
3 October 2006
We enjoyed this this evening, though it is, I think, true to say that it wasn't fun. It's stylish, as you'd expect from a French film, but bleak. The three sisters really do take their tragic childhood very seriously and seem determined to have it copulate (imdb is prudish about reviews) their lives up as much as possible - strangely they don't take the opportunity of a shared childhood with each other to try to get over it, but rather indulge in gloomy comparisons with Medea.

Professorial comments in French classes, if this is anything to go by, are truly risible. The idea that, whether life is deterministic or not is simply a matter of aesthetic appeal is truly adolescent. Still, the way he says it, it makes it sound profound - but, as Henry Higgins pointed out a long time ago, that's the French way, it doesn't matter much what you say as long as you pronounce it correctly.

I wasn't sure quite why there was the homage to the three colours films. In all of them, an old woman has trouble getting a bottle into a bottle bank, and in this another old woman has the same problem. Maybe it isn't homage, maybe French bottle banks are a notorious old woman trap, but I doubt it. Is it just that this is also supposed to be part of a trilogy of films?

There was a very good line early on in the film that I thought that I ought to remember, it sounded exactly right to me. Sadly, though, it can't have been that good (or the rest of film was so absorbing) that I can't remember what it was. Anybody else who has seen it might be able to help, it was an amusing line - somebody, a chap, said it in a hall way, if that helps.

I liked the cuckoo sequence - though it wasn't that clear who was supposed to be the cuckoo and who the children turfed out of the nest, particularly when you knew all the facts. I suppose that it fitted well with the defenestration, if nothing else.

Evian being, vaguely, naive in mirror writing was a nice touch - it is, of course, naive, or something, to spend money on water when you can get it from the tap for next to nothing, but the makers of Evian mightn't find it the best advertisement ever.

Is it really true that you can keep a headless chicken alive for several months? I doubt that. Almost a thousand people seem a lot for a cannibal to eat, even over a lifetime, even a cannibal chief, especially if he only avoided eating the completely indigestible bits. But then, I suppose that it must be true.

I'd recommend it, though, as a fairly intelligent evening out. It isn't as good as one of the thee colours films - I've watched each of those several times and I'd only consider watching this again to pick up the bon mot in the first ten minutes that I've forgotten. I did like the kaleidoscopic images, though, I suppose that it is noteworthy that they have three mirrors...
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