Monday Morning

This typically taciturn and droll comedy of modern manners from Paris-based Georgian auteur Iosseliani is in some respects a companion piece to his delightful, neglected Farewell, Home Sweet Home. Vincent (Bidou) lives with his wife, kids and mother in a French farming village; every Monday, he undergoes the routine of waking up, taking the train to town, and starting another week's work as a welder in a noisy, fume-filled factory. The job and the demands of an unappreciative family hardly leave time to pursue his passion for painting. Then a visit to his ailing black-sheep father revives forgotten dreams of travel; suddenly and without warning, Vincent's off on a voyage of self-discovery and indulgence, leaving his folk to fend for themselves. The narrative ambles at a pleasingly gentle pace, even making a brief diversion from Vincent's odyssey to take in his village's somewhat eccentric inhabitants, before rejoining him for a visit to Venice and a wonderfully wry account of male camaraderie. The humour is mainly physical, gestural and spatial, naturalistic in tone yet faintly surreal, and imbued throughout with an understanding of our need to be true to ourselves, to slip free once in a while, and to resist - but, alas, finally accept - life's inevitable compromises.