Bernie

A black comedy set in France. Bernie is thirty. He spent his life in an orphanage and has never seen the outside. The institution releases him. He is over the age limit. He has one piece of information: he was found in a bin. He goes looking for his family. From there the film is a story of searching. Bernie is in the street asking people questions and knows no social rule at all. His speech is strange. Direct, coarse and entirely unfiltered. Violence does not seem unreasonable to him. If a door does not open he breaks it; if a person does not answer he hits them. The narrative builds this as comedy and at the same time keeps it genuinely disturbing. He finds a trail. An address, a former employee, a hospital record. Then he finds a family. He decides it is his. He settles in with them. He watches them, gets into their house, and by degrees installs himself inside their lives. What the narrative is interested in is not family but institutions: its idea is that a person nobody taught anything is released into society, and that responsibility for what results belongs to no one. Bernie has a video camera. He films everything and part of the film is that footage directly. The tone is very hard. The violence is sudden, bloody, and unsettling even where it is meant to be funny. The ending is entirely dark and the narrative compensates for nothing. Albert Dupontel directed, wrote and played the lead; it is his first feature. He had performed one-man shows on stage before, and the language here comes from that. Albert Dupontel, Claude Perron, Roland Blanche and Hélène Vincent are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes hard black humour and French outsider cinema. Who it is not for: anyone who does not want to be unsettled; the narrative sets out to make you feel guilty for what it made you laugh at.