best movie i've ever seen.

As Good As It Gets

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Alain Resnais was at the age of 76 when he made his first musical, and to be honest he might just be the last filmmaker I would've guessed to make a musical - even that music has always played a huge part in his films. Alain Resnais was one of the most essential auteurs of the French new wave in early 1960's, during which he got a reputation as an experimental filmmaker by making Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961) - who would've thought that a man who made these tragic, ambiguous films was going to make a musical? To my mind, through Same Old Song (1997) Resnais achieved the same Hitchcock did; combining experimentalism and populism - the film was drowned by Cesar awards.In my opinion Same Old Song is the best musical made after the 1960's. Just like western and film-noir so has this genre died. But luckily someone was still able to bring something new to it. Same Old Song is and is not a musical. In the genre wishful thinking, better and dreamed ego, hopes for a better world and existence are combined. From this perspective Same Old Song is a musical but this idyllic joy is destroyed by showing the actual agony and depression that possess the characters. In the film the characters sing in appropriate and inappropriate situations; the music comes from a tape and it doesn't necessarily fit into the mouth of the singer. A young lady can sing throaty and loudly, and a German officer can burst out to a falsetto.In the beginning there is a Resnaisian leap of time: 50 years, from WWII to the lives of the regardless and ignorant bourgeoisie of today. The reality is very elusive, nothing and no one is what they first seem to be: the inappropriate songs. The characters aren't living in harmony with each other nor with themselves, what the idyllic songs seem to reinforce - it's all a lie, fake, window dressing.The characters sing classics by Edith Piaf, Serge Gainsbourg and Charles Trenet - same old songs. "No one in our world can sing songs throughly anymore." (Alain Resnais) So all the songs are association; we only here brief fragments from them and this idea works brilliantly. The songs/ideas remain undone and the characters don't empathize. An old Avantgardist goes deeper into the core of art, not by adding but by erasing and simplifying.Same Old Song could be seen as a parody or a travesty of musicals as the artificial joy wins. But it also has a social dimension; depicting the illusion of bourgeois happiness. The ostensible joy of the same old songs hides the depression, tiredness and panic disorders: "How long does depression last?, - 'Mine has lasted for four years.'" The things of everyday life, falling in love, decent life bury the actual fears of reality. The characters eat a lot and go to cocktail-parties, they don't really know who they are. The postmodern architecture represents the rootlessness of the characters and the vacancy of their lives - Alain Resnais continued from here in his later film Coeurs (2006), which is the best romantic comedy made in decades.An obscure agony characterizes the city the characters live in. The singing society and artificial happiness are like a horror-utopia - to which not even some of the finest science fictions can't be compared to. Some of the characters realize their agony, share it and move on. But the others continue their artificial idyllic life - singing with no worries.

I am sure that there are many out there that enjoyed this film a lot more than me and I think this film is a wonderful example of a film that you'll either love or hate. This is because the idea of people breaking into lip-sync songs is pretty peculiar and may not be for everyone! I actually didn't mind this concept, but strongly disliked the execution. Instead of singing long numbers and perhaps dancing or getting into the moment, instead the characters sang a line or two or three from a song and then very abruptly stopped. The shift in mood was just too abrupt and the surreal moments were never allowed to develop and captivate the audience. It really was as if they tried to cram way too many songs into the film so they abbreviated them so much that the viewer was left confused by how disjoint the film was. A nice attempt at something different, but not especially worth seeing.

In the unapproximate center of "On connaît la chanson," find a marvelous joke that missed by everyone at the sold out SFIFF screening I attended. If you want to try to catch it yourself, then don't read on! I'm writing to those of you who didn't or won't catch it. Four or five characters are seated chatting or arguing, I forget, round a table in a busy restaurant. As you know from other comments here, the script incorporates line fragments from well-known French songs (kind of like those "hidden picture" puzzles in the dentist office magazine). As each occurs, someone bursts into song. One of our group, after an unremarkable, perfectly conversational pause, says "je ne regret rien," then pauses, as does everyone else round the table. They look at one another, everyone at everyone, the very clatter of the restaurant seems to pause, waiting, and for the only time in this film, nobody takes the cue. Nobody breaks into the Piaf standard.

This film is light, but not empty. Following the interconnected lives of several Parisian bourgeois, the film uses snippets of popular music to demonstrate the emotional state of the characters in the style of a conventional musical. However, the music does both more than this and less. The characters do not sing their parts so much as lip-sync (badly) to tunes that one hears on the radio or in a movie. The songs are related to the characters' "inner lives" as a Nike swoosh or a Dior label would be - and that's the point. Each character has a musical style of sorts and maybe even a theme song, but the song "belongs" to the character like motion "belongs" to a jelly-fish. The characters, like the jelly-fish that are a motif of the finale scene, are less than unique, and much less than in control. However, they are at the same time quite human and sympathetic.Resnais, whom I count as being one of cinema's great geniuses, has a similar approach in On connaît la chanson as he does in Mon oncle d'Amérique, with pop songs in lieu of mice and jelly-fish in lieu of Henri Laborit. (See the info on the latter movie if this doesn't make sense...) What both films do is make one think about important questions of the complex relationship between brains, minds, and souls, and they do so without clobbering the viewer over the head with preachiness and over-simplifications. Contrast this with the sermonizing of the abominable Lars von Trier (of Dancer in the Dark fame) as well as with the mindless drek that that is generally shown in U.S. theaters.