Reviews
Mammuth review
June 3 2011
Benoît Delépine, Gustave de Kervern
Starring Gérard Depardieu, Isabelle Adjani, Yolande Moreau
Make a note of the names Delépine and de Kervern. That way you can avoid them in future.
Directors Benoît Delépine and Gustave de Kervern specialise in bleak, deadpan black comedies about the plight of the common worker. In Mammuth, Serge (Gérard Depardieu) faces a grim retirement nursing his prostate and disgusting his wife with his dodgy DIY skills.
It’s almost too much for him when he’s forced to get on his motorbike and trundle around the countryside in an effort to locate the missing work papers that will help beef up his meagre pension. Not much occurs on the journey: some of his old haunts are rickety ruins, others have changed hands. Along the way he’s reunited with an oddball niece who makes hideous art out of broken dolls.
On paper, this looks like an improvement on the duo’s previous outing, hit-and-miss revenge comedy Louise-Michel. It seems to promise greater depth and seriousness, more maturity, more focus. But no. While Louse-Michel had plenty of lows, it also had its crazy highs. By contrast, Mammuth ambles through a number of loosely strung vignettes with all the pace of a Zimmer frame in long grass.
Delépine and de Kervern have clearly entered a phase of diminishing returns with their pet themes of bleak lives, proletarian banality and geriatric decay. But what really makes this film irksome is Serge. He’s completely interchangeable with the pair’s previous protagonist Louise – the same shaggy, baggy character, mute and opaque.
Every now and then, in a lazy attempt to give him dimension, a phantom dead girlfriend in the guise of Isabelle Adjani pops up, but that just makes you wish you were watching an Isabelle Adjani movie.
There’s no discernible social agenda either, not unless you count a kind of cultural tourism that portrays the working classes as lovable grotesques on a par with garden gnomes. The film’s answer to Serge’s woes is for him to smoke some weed with his pothead niece and think about taking up verse. Become a poet? We’d love to hear Delépine and de Kervern offering that advice outside the local job centre.
Anticipation:
Enjoyment:
In Retrospect:
Mammuth (text) by Julian White is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
For what it's worth, I loved this film – much as I loved the filmmakers' hilarious debut Aaltra.
It is true that the advice to 'become a poet' would not go down well at a job centre – but Serge is not actually seeking a job. He is instead looking for a pastime in retirement that will give him a sense of personal dignity, and allow him to live his life to the full – when everyone else seems to expect him just to die, quickly and quietly. And he becomes a philosopher, not a poet. I also disagree that Serge lacks character – he has always been defined by his work, and his character is inscribed in the long and varied trail of jobs that his journey (a road trip down memory lane, like in Broken Flowers) retraces. As it happens, this trip also traces the changing world of work, which is what I thought very much gave this film its 'social agenda'. It is not just called 'Mammuth' because of the make of Serge's classic motorboke, but because he himself is a shaggy, lumbering creature who seems obsolescent, if not entirely extinct, within the newly rationalised, corporatised, globalised system that he is forced to negotiate in order to find his old employment papers (some of which are now forever buried, much as several of his prior workplaces have vanished). The film is like a lost history of a proletariate that is increasingly marginalised. It is also grimly funny, and earns the heartwarming glow of its ending.
Written by Anton Bitel on June 2nd, 2011 at 12:23