12 November 2011

La Classe Américaine/ Le Grand Détournement


This is a film by the same director who made The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius, but this time he is not trying to recreate an ancient way of making film, that is to say, silent movies, this time he has used a parodical process and in doing so created a new personal œuvre.
In this creational process he uses a lot of Warner Bros.-films made between 1952 and 1980 including excerpts from 'Maigret' (the serie of the inspector by the same name and built on the books by Georges Simenon).
In that way this film is also a blink to film history but in another way.

Basically this is a homage to Orson Welles' 'Citizen Kane' and Welles is also appearing in it declaring that he doesn't like "thiefs and sons of bitches", giving it an aura of being a dedication more than a plagiarism of Welles.

The film starts with the following sign, with delibarate spelling errors:
"Attention! This flim is not a flim about cyclign. Thank you for your
understanding."

"The Most Classy Man on Earth" dies and the last words he utters are not "Rosebud" but: "cr*ppy world!". Well, not so classy but maybe true.
Three reporters: Dave (Paul Newman), Peter (Dustin Hoffman) and Steven (Robert Redford), triy to investigate his death and what his last words might have meant.

The performances by the actors are - as you've understood - taken from other films, in the case with Hoffman and Redford from 'Allt the President's Men'.

The three journalists mainly search evidence on the fictious atoll Pom Pom Galli, taken from the John Wayne movie 'The Sea Chase'.
What they find out is that 'the classiest man in the world' might not have been as classy as they initially thought.

As you understand this film is filled of these kinds of references and it's just for the spectator to find them all. You can always arrange a competition among your friends.

In all, it's an interesting film from this point of view and the parodical elements sometimes turn into absurdity and this makes the film very humourous.
It's not a master piece but a film we can recommend you to see and why not try to look for possible links between this film and 'The Artist'.

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