Article by Ludovico Franco

Translation by Federica Riccardi

Through the metropolitan network of Paris, the most faithful companion of human life roams about: death. Having become famous with Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi – illustrator and cartoonist even before being a director – assigns the role of absolute protagonist to the Grim Reaper in her latest film. In all its forms and declinations, we see her disrupt the lives of different characters, woven into a vast plot whose interweavings slowly emerge.

The mistakenly declared death of a narcissistic opera singer (Monica Bellucci) in her twilight years, who wakes up from an Edgar Allan Poe nightmare in a morgue cell. Death challenged daily by a professional stuntman (Ben Aldridge). Death filmed with morbid and ironic curiosity by a TV presenter (André Dussollier). Death reciprocated through a friendly pact with the almighty by an old woman (Rossy De Palma). Death sought, through attempted suicides, by a teenager suffering from depression (Charline Emane).

The risk of creating a saturated and uneven pot-pourri is very high, as can be deduced from this quick look at the film’s comédie humaine. Unfortunately, Satrapi fails to avoid this and clumsily apes the great choral auteurs (Robert Altman, but also the Michael Haneke of Code inconnu, set in a Paris that becomes a metonymy of the West), without having their skill in orchestrating the play of destinies. The result is a constellation of stars that don’t shine, banal and pale situations that start nowhere and arrive nowhere.

With the (too) lightness that is congenial to her, it takes the discourse to extremes in the ways of paradox and watered-down grotesque, from which arises the major limitation of stopping halfway. The director’s flatness restricts the universal aspirations to a petty satire of manners, of predictable anecdote and in intervals related to facile symbolism, such as the crucifixion, which downplays the girl’s serious self-destruction to a selfish affectation in search of attention.

An excellent cast of well-known actorial bodies (above all Rossy De Palma, a perfect almodovarian creature) is not enough to keep the ship of fools afloat, and any attempt to question current society is neutralised by a finale in which tout va bien, a melancholy apologia for the French capital. In the end, the film is a bit like the ultra-technological coffin displayed at the beginning: shiny and polished, which contains every vanitas, but it remains empty because Cinema is absent.

Ludovico Franco