Life Is a Long Quiet River

La vie ... is one of the movies I have rewatched and reliked over a long period of time. Incredibly, this was the first movie for the filmmaker and most of his actors, who nonetheless managed to deliver time-proof quality. This is a very dark movie which pitches two families against each other - - the ne'er-do-well Grosseilles and the terribly nice Le Quesnoy family of the local electricity works director. As it turns out, a jilted nurse switched their newborns 12 years ago, which might account for the boy's criminal intelligence and the daughter's predilection for dressing up as a tart. Sit back and watch one family squander their fortunes, and the other family fall into social decline.

Etienne Chatiliez is a director possessing a deft hand for comedy both cruel and subtle: think "Tatie Danielle" for the former and "Le bonheur est dans le pre" for a bit of the latter. La vie est un long fleuve tranquille is a hilarious examination of class-based comedy in the late 80s in France, with the time honoured "baby-switching" plot point to kick things off. Great performances allow a very funny film to sparkle on the screen. Highly recommended.

Unlike the feel good, "everything turns out for the best," "innate human goodness" fluff comedies that we see in the US, this film is based on the proposition that, under pressure, everyone falls to the level of the lowest common denominator. Years in the past a scorned nurse/lover switched newborns to spite the doctor who was the subject of her ire. When it was revealed, in the present, that these families from opposite sides of the track had each raised the other's son to his early teens, they set about to make it right. After all, there was enough success to go around. Right? Rather than bringing everyone up to the level of the wealthy politician's family, however, the children (siblings included) become a lot of foul mouthed, cigarette smoking, truants who enjoy their delinquent lives to the fullest. Naturally, the parents follow suit. No one is immune. The film is a keeper, though the humor is decidedly French and some subtleties are likely lost in the translation.

This film is perhaps my favorite French comic film. I have seen it over and over through the years, perhaps 50 times. Having lived in France, I relish it's send-up of two stereotypical French families and their attitudes and interactions with each other as well as with institutions: the church, schools, the medical profession, foreigners among them, etc. As I see it over and over, it is my delight to concentrate on one character or another as they delineate a stereotypical trait. The subtleties are hilarious, yet I can imagine those who have never lived among the French might be bewildered, even turned off.

I'm french and I really enjoyed this movie.It shows how the upper class lives in a world of lies, how everything is based on appearance, on what you look like and not on who you really are. This movie is really one of the most funny french movies done in the last decades. You can't watch how the "Groseilles" live without laugh.I watch it when I was 10 years old and since then I like it.

This first feature of Étienne Chatilliez is litterally cult in France. Like Les bronzés everybody knows the lines and some are really cult. These two families on the opposite side of the social ladder represent a France that still exist today.

I was quite surprised that many commenters didn't appreciate this film at all. I think you have to understand class differences in French society and the film's kind of satire in order to be able to enjoy the film. I personally loved it though I would have expected a real 'catastrophe' at the end. But I nevertheless liked the story and the characters, especially this very ridiculous, 'perfect' bourgeois family. I loved the scene where the father looks at the crying, completely desperate mother and the only thing that comes to his mind is to tell her: "Comme vous êtes belle ce soir!" (How beautiful you are this evening!) Probably Americans are not so familiar with this kind of black, but also at times subtle humor and this is why the reactions were so bad.

The subject of two children being switched at birth could have easily been the canvas for a melodramatic movie. Instead of that, this work presents a playfull comedy where the clichés of society classes are scrutinized. The laughs are in the details, some dialogs are just memorable. And if the ending might seem a little unsettled, it has the intelligence of leaving questions and conclusions to the spectator about wealth and happiness.

Meet the Groseille family, every upscale parent's living nightmare and no doubt the shabbiest collection of trash outside of a John Waters film. Compare them to the Le Quesnoy household on the other side of the tracks: respectable, comfortably privileged, and soon to have their upper crust complacency shattered when a long-lost son, raised by the wayward Groseilles, returns home to corrupt his true family. The film is a mixed bag, at best a mildly amusing social satire mocking the pretensions of a bourgeois yuppie lifestyle, but it's never clear if the prodigal son's lack of class is genetic or environmental: in other words, is the kid rotten because of his blue-collar upbringing or his white-collar breeding? The scenario also lacks the mean streak this kind of story needs. Except for the exploding car in the pre-credit prologue (a tremendous hook, barely acknowledged afterward) the film is perhaps too faithful to its title: long and quiet instead of short and nasty.

At last, this little gem of a film is available on DVD (only in French, no subtitles, but it is, in any case, a difficult film to enjoy other than in French), together with 2 hours of additional interviews. This film is a wicked little satire on the differences (and, below the surface, the similarities) between the bourgeois LeQuesnoy family and the wastrel Groseille family. The artifice used is the switching of two children at birth by the unhappy mistress of the gynaecologist. For many of the actors and the director, this was their first film, providing a stepping stone for greater things. But "La Vie est un Long Fleuve Tranquille" should not be missed. Many of its little jokes became catchphrases in the France of the eighties and early nineties, so cruelly apt were they. And do not miss Etienne Chatiliez's later films, particularly "Tatie Danielle" et "Le Bonheur est dans le Pre". You might not enjoy this film - some people clearly haven't. But I recommend you make the effort to decide for yourself. It will be worth it.