The Snows of Kilimanjaro
A sappy, shallow analysis of class dynamics configured across... ah, who cares?
SCREENINGS:
Wednesday, September 14, 8 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox 3 (350 King Street West)
Saturday, September 17, 6 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox 4 (350 King Street West)
Titled after a Hemingway short story it has nothing to do with and adapted from Victor Hugo’s poem “How Good Are The Poor,” Guédiguian’s latest is pretty confused even before its opening scene, in which 20 welders are laid off by lottery. Included in their ranks is their comfortably middle-class union liaison, Michel (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who threw his name into the lottery as a mawkish show of solidarity. Cheerily tossing off some Marxist platitude and packing a revolutionary vignette and a Spider-Man poster (see? he is both in love and at odds with capitalism!) into a box, Michel accepts early retirement and plans a vacation with his wife (Ariane Ascaride).
Things are going swimmingly until their home gets invaded one night, with two masked bandits making out with 5,000 Euros and the couples’ plane tickets to Swahili. When one of the assailants turns out to be a co-worker he laid off with his little lottery (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), Michel begins considering the nature of his staid middle-class life and whether he’s become out of touch with the labour radical he once was. There are interesting ideas here, but they’re laid on in such astonishingly broad strokes that it’s hard to imagine how they even emerged in the first place. Scene after scene, what sets itself up as a movie about labour equity and class tensions subdivided among generational lines slides into the murk of sentimentality.