Life Upside Down

Jacques Valin, who works at a Paris estate agency, has an outwardly perfect life: a job, a beautiful girlfriend, order. At a certain point he begins withdrawing from it and shutting himself inside a world of his own. You could say he is going mad, and by conventional measures perhaps he is; but from where he stands the life he is leaving is far more absurd, and the film puts that view across so sharply and so wittily that the viewer starts taking what he builds as the more real of the two. Alain Jessua adapted the screenplay from a novel he had written himself. It was his first feature and it won the best first film prize at Venice in 1964. Charles Denner takes the lead.