La vie est un roman (1983)

Director:

Alain Resnais

Writer:

Jean Gruault (writer)

Release Date:

20 April 1983 (France)

Genre:

Drama | Comedy | Musical

Plot:

Three intertwined tales. On the eve of the First World War, Count Forbek starts to build a fantastic castle in the Ardennes forest...

Plot Keywords:

Education | Eccentric | Drugs | Dream

Awards:

2 nominations

Cast

Vittorio Gassman	...	Walter Guarini
Ruggero Raimondi	...	Comte Michel Forbek / Count Michel Forbek
Geraldine Chaplin	...	Nora Winkle
Fanny Ardant	...	Livia Cerasquier
Pierre Arditi	...	Robert Dufresne
Sabine Azéma	...	Élisabeth Rousseau
Robert Manuel	...	Georges Leroux
Martine Kelly	...	Claudine Obertin
Samson Fainsilber	...	Zoltán Forbek
Véronique Silver	...	Nathalie Holberg
André Dussollier	...	Raoul Vandamme
Guillaume Boisseau	...	Frédéric
Sabine Thomas	...	Marie
Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu	...	School Teacher
Rodolphe Schacher	...	Pierre

Also Known As:

Life Is a Bed of Roses (USA)
A Vida É um Romance (Brazil) (TV title) (Portugal) [pt]
La vida es una novela (Argentina) (Mexico) [es]
Das Leben ist ein Roman (West Germany) [de]
I zoi einai ena romantzo (Greece) [el]
La vita è un romanzo (Italy) [it]

Runtime:

110 min | Argentina:111 min

Country:

France

Language:

French

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Certification:

Italy:T | UK:PG | USA:PG | Argentina:Atp

Company:

Fideline Films

probably the nadir of Resnais's career

Watching the first few moments, you realize it's going to be a parody - and certainly it *is* a parody, but I'm not sure of what (a fairy tale? an opera? a Hollywoodian C-movie? - if there was something like that), and I can assure you it's not worth watching. It's simply a pointless film (cf. a good parody is everything but pointless), with pretentious, shallow speeches of extremely sketchy characters. It's like a commedia dell'arte. Or better, it's like a botched commedia dell'arte. And the score... sung in an intentionally incompetent way (something Greenaway will use much more efficiently), it *is* painful to listen to (unless one wears some sate-of-the-art earplugs, haha). Go for quality movies (e.g. A. Mitta's How Czar Peter the Great Married Off His Moor, 1976) and steer clear of this mistake.