Getting to Heaven: An Alternative Version Element A: Remy's red-haired chicken, living in a chicken coop with his mother and sister, tries to climb into the shell because: definitely red-haired, definitely sociopathic, slightly less misanthropic, possibly gay. Element B: Patrick, a psychoanalyst who has lost interest in his client base, who is beginning to be bored with longing and loneliness, is not as friendly with his head as he is with the world around him, but he can easily find a common language with the first and second. And then they cross paths. Getting closer. They begin to “asocialize” together, and walking along the plot trying to understand something about each other, learn something, understand something.
Asocial cinema, which tells about the life of mentally unbalanced individuals disadvantaged by society and everyday life, appears here and there. Along the way carries the cult of violence in mild and severe forms. Another philosophical subtext. And drama.
Everything that happens on screens for almost an hour and a half does not fit into the concept of “ordinary everyday life”. We can say more: it does not fit into the existing reality. The road to Remy’s dream will go to red-headed Ireland, filled with pits and bumps in the form of fights, hooliganism, bullying, arson and shootouts (some truth in the singular). The methods of psychoanalyst Patrick are not pedagogical, but effective: irritating the social environment and confronting it with his ward, he brings Remy to his senses, brings him out of a closed collapse. Along the way, he manages to occupy secondary characters, having previously splashed several scoops of insults on them. Why he should spend his time and money this way, God only knows (but you can bet on the midlife crisis and the need for an emotional shake-up). Because of this, some things seem a little unrealistic and extremely illogical. Towards the end of the film, it is schizophrenic and paranoid. The methods of psychoanalyst Patrick could be called successful if everything ended not as we wanted.
And if the characters did not change places: if the psychologist did not fall into the original state of the patient (realizing his unstable helplessness and lone old age), and the patient did not begin to play the excavator himself (after a whip in the form of tests for social fitness and a carrot in the form of a credit card). In general, the theme of substitution of the states of the main characters is periodically discussed by directors. Or Trier will create two sisters: an agonizing melancholy and an idealist Samaritan, keep them like this half of the film, and then make the idealist “melancholic” and “melancholic” Samaritan (see the film “Melancholy”). Or the aspiring British director Paddy Considine will show us a socially unstable old man and a cute religious aging woman who will be socially unbalanced by the end of the film while recovering (see Tyrannosaurus). The reasons are always different: specific circumstances, the proximity of the disaster of total scale, or just out the whole soul of the characters. But it is still interesting to observe this: plots and situations are good enough together with craftsmen that these topics are taken up.
The bonus to that fleeting madness in Our Day Will Come is a serious approach to the young director's case, Romaine Gavras. Having trained on the set of clips, he creates a beautiful picture in his debut film: where you need to pick up an interesting exposition, where you need to make a pleasant panorama for the eye, and if necessary, at a time of strong tension, shake the camera so that the head will go around and in the eyes will begin to ripple.
About Vincent Cassel and his talents, to talk even somehow shameful and inappropriate, realizing that everyone already knows that he is one of the best actors of modern France, which bandits and crazy to play like two fingers on asphalt. It would be possible to argue whether Cassel is attractive or not, and whether it is true that he is bald, he does not look like an alien or Gollum, but somehow it is not serious. That's where we'll stop.
8 out of 10