Film Reviews

Monday Morning

• Rating:
• Director: Otar Ioseliani
• Starring: Adrien Pachod
• Details: Fra / 121 mins / (No Cert).

A strange comedy drama, Monday Morning follows Vincent (Jacques Bidou), a welder in a prosperous French village. Superficially, things seem to be going well for Vincent - he's married with children - and even if his job is somewhat mundane, he's kept busy. Beneath the surface, however, Vincent seems dissatisfied with the path his life has taken and one morning, without a word of warning, he ups and heads for Venice, leaving his squabbling, selfish family behind him.

Deeply puzzling and ambiguous, Monday Morning seems to be a documentation of one man's midlife awakening but the narrative lacks definition, and the director's tendency to drift from one surreal episode to another lends the entire affair an air of farce. One of the central themes of Monday Morning (well, that I could make out, anyway) seems to be an attack on the humdrum routine of regular employment. Yet Ioseliani's wilful disregard of the accepted parameters of the conventional narrative and his refusal to substitute them with anything bearing real substance becomes an exercise in boredom itself. Then again, maybe that's the point. Either way, it's not really worth two hours of your time.

Review by Garreth Murphy