Strange fun in Gardens

GARDENS IN AUTUMN
Director: Otar Iosseliani, Country: France, in French with English subtitles, Release: 2006, Runtime: 116 min.

Jacques Tati meets After Hours

The first scene opens on a group of old men all of differing shaped and sizes. They mill about looking at coffins and three seem to be arguing over the same one. The story, if you can call it that, starts to develop around a diplomat, Vincent, making his rounds to ceremonies, signing things, arguing with his spendthrift wife, signing his own resignation letter after crowd protests, and spending the majority of the film bouncing from one absurdist moment to another reconnecting with characters is his life. There are girlfriends - one who kicks him out, another who cleans him up, another who takes him to the hospital. All give him versions of shoes, one being a pair of rollerblades. He runs into priests on bicycles and goes drinking with them in a bar with fun drawings being filled in on the walls. He visits his mother, played by a man, to get keys to the family flat. The flat is runneth over with Afrikan squatters. On and on the strange yet seemingly normal situations and crossed paths keep occurring. Some elements keep repeating - playing music, pictures of animals, a caged tucan, a live leopard, and getting hit on the head. Strange as this all sounds, it is rather fun getting pulled along this serpentine path. Most of the dialog is superfluous in this very animate journey. The frivolous sequences are the most fun and an old guy dressed as granny always gets me to laugh. It tending to drag towards the end but I had fun trying to figure out some of the commentary. There is the obvious reference to the corruption of the elite controlling class. And gender and cultural differences are constant companions throughout but some shots are just fun or funny without trying to see any deeper meaning in it. The humor is dryer than typical character rambles and much more unpredictable than American sitcoms. Too many forced funny lines and overt pratfalls can kill the moment; Iosseliani steers clear of those. Again and again we slowly get bits of color and characters in Vincent's life, just like the characters on the walls of the bar. Would you want to paint over those characters, those moments, those colors? Better yet, keep alive these memories of a life-journey worth living.