Adieu, Plancher des Vaches!

I am not sure exactly if it is because his last movie was about Parisian gardens in autumn, but, the feeling I always get from Otar Iosseliani's films is the serenity, humidity and melancholy of that season. It is the autumn for the director, as it is the passing of the French cinema as we know, as something has been happening in Paris, without only the French realizing. That must be the root of this feeling, it has to be.


The 1999 movie, Adieu, Plancher des Vaches, shown in english as Farewell Home Sweet Home, tells the story of people from different places within the society, well, maybe instead of the word story, it is better to use just being, since it is an Iosseliani film; and the lives that are loosely linked, even within a family. It can not be said that the film has one center, however, on the side very close to the focus point, there is the son of a wealthy family, which will only be mentioned as the son, who, for the reasons best known to himself, works in a restaurant as a dish washer and spends his days with outsiders on the streets; when he is fired from the restaurant, he will find another job like that, and another, and another, all just to earn a little bit of money that will lead to wine. When he goes out of his palace-like suburban house in the mornings, he changes his clothes from a suit to jeans and casual shirt. He definitely rejects to be part of a society where money, business and all the boredom are the ultimate purpose. One day, he becomes part of a petty crime and is sent to prison; when he goes out, about one and a half years later, he is to find many things changed.

If I were to choose the adjective 'hilarious' for a movie, I would pick this one, though it is not the kind of hilarious in common sense; it is so surprising and so natural that you can not help but laugh. I realized at the end of the movie that even when I was not laughing, I watched the whole other parts of the movie with a smiling face. It is the usual Iosseliani world; there is the constant drinking, singing and talking among friends, hatred of work in any routine sense, love for women or men, as long as they are never wives or husbands, the presence of plants and animals among humans, and the lives of outsiders, whether wealthy, or living on the street.


The characters in Adieu, Plancher des Vaches! all build a patchwork quilt, it is the contradictions and a different way of holding on to life that attract the audience; and yet, it is also all about kindness, a constant offer of more drinks, more cigarettes, more sharing between the characters. Even still, as I am writing these lines, am smiling.