Merci la vie

Wheeling a supermarket trolley full of seagulls, shy, sexually inexperienced Camille (Gainsbourg) comes across Joëlle (Grinberg), a none- too-virginal abandoned bride seen by Camille as a gift from heaven. The pair embark on a series of raucous, sometimes violent and often funny (mis)adventures with variously exploitative, lecherous and pathetic men: fathers, film-makers, a doctor (Depardieu), a Nazi officer (Trintignant). Is it all really happening, or just a movie, or simply Camille's dream? Snazzily shot, wittily performed and structured, Buñuel-fashion, according to the logic of a dream, this bizarre blend of road movie, comedy, psychodrama and various other genres shifts with wayward glee not only between times - the present (?) and WWII - but between colour, black-and-white and monochrome tints. Lending some coherence is a sense that every age has its crises (AIDS, the Holocaust), that life is shit; but Blier's precise intentions are finally unfathomable.