14 November 2021

Luc Moullet's Foix : la ville la plus ringarde de France (1994)

(In September of this year, 2021, the Cinémathèque française showed a number of films by the almost forgotten Luc Moullet, who at the age of eighty-four is still very much alive. When the daily paper Libération interviewed him, living on the fifth floor of a block of flats, he said he's horrified of lifts, and measures the state of a visitor's health by counting the minutes between their initial intercom ring and the time they arrive at his door. In another article in the same paper, Moullet says "I'm not a very normal person. I always live a little at the side of reality". (My translation, and I shall continue to include this paragraph in any further posts on Mouillet as they are not only an introduction to his work, but also (surely) strong indications of an Asperger element.))

Luc Moullet's Foix, with its mockumentary voiceover, belies the reality we see: the voice talks about the wonderful sights of Foix, but we only see dismal buildings; the voice talks about a wonderful transport system, where the viewer only sees chaos, etc.  In the Rex cinema there is an example of graffiti: 'Le Rex 'cest bien mais je préfère le sexe.' Most old-fashioned town in France? Well, most if not all towns would look similar if taken from a negative angle. An odd film, but then it's by Luc Moullet.

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