THE RED DWARF (LE NAIN ROUGE)
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Samuel Goldwyn Films Director: Yvan LeMoine Writer: Yvan LeMoine based on Michel Tournier's short story Cast: Jean-Yves Thual, Anita Ekberg, Dyna Gauzy, Michel Peyrelon, Arno Chevrier, Carlo Colombaioni
Two giants of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, wrote profusely, but you can boil their ideas down to two words: love and work. If you have found love in your life and if your career affords you satisfaction, you've got it made. Chances are your mental health is sound. If you do not find fulfillment in your work or gratification in love, you are likely as not to be neurotic. If we define a neurotic as a person with unresolved anger or eternal anxiety, then Belgian director Yvan Le Moine's title character, the red dwarf, is his embodiment. Shot in black-and-white to cast a distinctive effect (Le Moine considers color photography drab), "The Red Dwarf" uses the figure of an actual dwarf, Lucien Lhotte (Jean-Yves Thual), to represent the small, frustrated person locked up inside each of us straining for relief and redemption. This is a simple story remarkably told, yet for all its directness "The Red Dwarf" possesses the impact of a classic parable about the life of the ordinary person. If we represent banality by Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, a salesman whose life is rooted in illusion, then the red dwarf is a constructive icon for today's thwarted everyman--for every worker whose job offers little satisfaction and whose leisure hours yield little contentment.
Director Le Moine shuns not only color for his photography but has his camera person, Danny Elsen, shoot scenes that are personally lit by Le Moine to cast a dusty glow upon the principal sets: the law office, the diva's luxurious villa and the traveling circus. The opening scene is stark, setting the tone for the tragi-comedy. In an old-fashioned work place, several lawyers are seated in what could be called a Kafkaesque bad dream. A supervisor sits facing the staff. Lucien, the dwarf, is seated in the rear of the room, his expression set in the rigid carriage of man who is bottling up enormous wrath. His job with the firm involves composing phony love letters that can be used as evidence in divorce cases. Sexually he is so repressed that he remains a while after the closing of the office to admire the cleaning woman's wiggling butt. At home, he throws the phone to the floor in impotent rage. A chance meeting with an 11-year-old trapeze artist, Isis (Dyna Gauzy), who works with a traveling circus, leads to the girl's attaching herself fondly to the dwarf. Yet another meeting with a battered, fabulously wealthy, aging diva, Countess Paola Bendoni (Anita Ekberg) leads Lucien to make a bold, successful attempt at seduction. When the countess returns to her husband Bob (Arno Chevirer), giving up the idea of divorce, Lucien is filled with a desire for revenge. He commits an existential act that changes the life of the miserable little thirty-five-year old man.
In satirizing office politics, Le Moine mines the comedy that has driven far more commercial movies like "Office Space," but he emphasizes the near-tragic, dreary undertones that are so familiar to men and women who are alienated in the work force. Lucien feels the disaffection more than the average fellow because his height makes him the object of condescension whether he is on the job, shopping in a store, trying to enjoy a drink at a bar or simply walking in the street. The people he runs into seem to think that they can play with him, to treat him generally as they would a child. Only when he takes a job in the circus does he put his handicap to good use, though his aspirations to be a big man--exhibited by his use of stilts and his climbing on the shoulders of a bulky co- worker--do not yield the satisfaction he ultimately gains when he returns the innocent love a child.
The entire work is suffused partly with the influence of Fellini, and indeed Anita Ekberg--who starred in the master's "La Dolce Vita" some 35 years ago--has returned in the role of a dissipated has-been. But a better case could be made for the influence of Piers Paolo Pasolini on this Belgian director. Pasolini, at once a Marxist and a man given to mystical religious feeling, had the same sympathetic feelings for the working class, shown most strongly in his images of a slum kid in "Accattone." Like Pasolini, Le Moine reaches back to medieval legend in composing a parable about wrath, one of the seven deadly sins, making this film the first of a planned series of seven on that very subject.
Mixing comedy and tragedy, debauchery with redemption, a lust for revenge with the ache for inner peace, "The Red Dwarf" is an impressive first work indeed for Mr. Le Moine, who shows promise to develop a sparkling series of tragi- comedies on humankind's favorite failings.
Not Rated. Running Time: 102 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews