Un, Deux, Trois, Soleil_1992_France

Bertrand Blier........Director / Screenwriter
Gerard de Battista........Cinematographer
Jerome Chalou........Production Designer
Cheb Khaled........Composer
Anton Bruckner........Featured Music
Gabriel Fauré........Featured Music

Cast:
Anouk Grinberg........Victorine 
Marcello Mastroianni........Constantin Laspada
Myriam Boyer........Mother
Olivier Martinez........Petit Paul
Irene Tassembedo........Gladys

  Victorine (Grinberg), a girl of a great kindness and naïveté, grows up with her Italian born father and mother and god knows (the father doesn’t know for sure) how many younger brothers and sisters in a corridor-system type apartment building, over-crowded with immigrants, refugees and paupers of all sorts, lost somewhere in the outskirts of Marseille. Her omnipresent and imposing mother (Boyer) likes to accompany her daughter on her way to the school every morning, annoying Victorine with excessive care and attention. Sometimes they even fight. Meanwhile her heartbreakingly sad father (Mastroianni) spends his days boozing himself to death with aperitifs in a local bistro, with criminal conniving of the barman. When Victorine realizes that her mother is going to ruin her promenades on the railway embankment with her presence, she decides to dump her into a garbage train… 
  As she grows older Victorine falls in love with a teenager gang member Petit Paul (Martinez) whose main occupation is robbing the apartments in the neighbourhood at nights. But life runs very high in these days and during one of the raids Petit Paul gets wounded. Alas, notwithstanding the help of Gladys (Tassembedo), bonny, in a late Picasso way, black wife of a district gendarme, who saves wounded boys' lives just by pressing them tightly to her bosom to warm them, the mutual love of our young protagonists is doomed to end with an eulogy…
  And it’s only after the death of her parents that Victorina discovers in herself an ability to invoke her dead relatives and friends to life by sheer force of her thought, sometimes all of them at once against her own will…
 If you don't know that living in the slums, petty theft, gang rape of a teacher by her pupils and even throwing one's own mother into a garbage train can be so hilariously funny don't hesitate to watch this film.
 With his trademark outrageous irreverence, Bertrand Blier casts a glance full of sympathy upon the mundane life of impoverished immigrant-ridden banlieus of southern France and, what is even more outrageous, he seems to consider the immigrants the only possible future for his ageing country, which is a very bold and controversial position upon the topic that was very tetchy in 1992 and is even more so now, in 2008. Devoid of cynicism, bitterness or attempt at judgment of any kind, his film is gleefully heartfelt, even if sometimes it reaches a level of high-pitched tragedy. While rejoicing in anarchic activities of juvenile delinquents, ingeniously juxtaposing Bruckner's Second and Third Symphonies with Khaled's flamboyant and ornamental Arabic chants "Un, deux, trois, soleil" is full of risque humour that never stoops to vulgarity.

 Racists and bigots beware!! Blier is going to offend the heck out of you:)
To the rest of you: enjoy it and feel free to leave a comment!

_104 min_NTSC_Colour_2.35:1_Stereo 2.0.
_In French with optional English subtitles.

DVD5 untouched.