May Fools

Louis Malle and Jean-Claude Carrière were both in Paris in May 1968, and Malle remembered it as the culmination of surrealism. In this film they never show Paris. Everything happens in the country, at a family estate near Bordeaux, and the uprising in the capital arrives only by radio, telephone and rumour. The family matriarch, Madame Vieuzac, has died. Everyone gathers for the funeral: her sons Milou and Georges, Milou's daughter Camille, Camille's husband and children, and the granddaughter Claire. While they argue over the inheritance, over old accounts and over who deserves what, the country outside is changing. They notice only when the strikes make petrol hard to find. Carrière and Malle wrote it; Carrière was Buñuel's long-time collaborator, and the film looks toward both Chekhov and Renoir. Michel Piccoli plays Milou and Miou-Miou plays Camille. Paulette Dubost, who appeared in Renoir's The Rules of the Game, is also in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like crowded family comedies set in a country house, and revolution observed from outside. Who it is not for: anyone wanting 1968 from the inside. This class is deliberately at a distance, and the film does not openly mock them; it just watches.