Oreste

Once you've accepted that you're not going to watch an episode of _Absolutely Fabulous_, you will enjoy this film. The two actresses are hilarious and the spirit and the decadence of the series is totally present. This film is very entertaining: I wasn't bored for one second!

Different from many other Chabrol movies that follow "Hitchock-like" patterns, _Jours tranquilles à Clichy_ relates the days a young American writer (Henry Miller) spent in the Gay Paris of the early thirties, with his polish-descent friend and their young Colette, a 14 years old-ish girl with whom they both fall in love. The story in itself doesn't send us from a surprising even to another but slowly lifts the curtain over the prostitution, pornography, libertinage and partying that seemed to oppose Paris so much to New York, in the eyes of Miller, searching for a change from the dull like he lead before. The story is a quest for Proust and his lost time, a quest for a new life, for thrills, for truth in forgetting oneself...

An Algerian immigrant, few days before receiving his papers to become a Canadian citizen finds out that his 19 years old son has erased all the data from government offices, as a terrorist action, and has disappeared somewhere in Northern Quebec.

With Huguette (his son's girlfriend, a tattoo artist), he leaves in a truck, "borrowed" to his former employer, for the Temiscamingue region where they try to convince this 19 years old revolutionnary not to destroy, with twenty guys, a bunch of passports.

Even if the terrorist underscore of the film sounds weak, it is a great motor of emotions beautifully delivered by the actors. Anger, compassion, love, all leading to a very touching - tear-pulling - ending for the movie, on an almost caricatural national anthem sung by immigrants.

This film is at the image of the new Québec cinema, new faces, new themes, new realities, a new form for the poetic languages, with it's strengths and weaknesses, with a great sense of reality, leaving enough space for the mind to travel.