Adieu Berthe-Enterrment de Mémé (Granny's Funeral)

I was plunged into reflection again last night into the world described by the last blog of my friend Peter: the world of death. But it was not through the "usual" route of meditation or philosophy. It's through comedy. I saw my fifth French film  Adieu Berthe-Enterrment de Mémé (Granny's Funeral) by Bruno Podalydès (Dieu seul me voit, Liberté-Oléron, Le Mystère de la chambre jaune) featuring his brother Denis Podalydès (
Embrassez qui vous voudrez,  Da Vinci Code, Laissez-passer,
La Conquête) Valérie Lemercier (Les Visiteurs, Le Derrière,
RRRrrrr!!!, Bienvenue à bord), Isabelle Candelier (Dieu
seul me voit, Mercredi folle journée) and  Catherine Hiegel (La vie est un long fleuve
tranquille, Gazon maudit). 

As the film opens, we see a woman Alix (Valérie Lemercier) (Alix being a dentist separated from her own husband whom Armand Lebrecq (Denis Podalydès). the protagonist, met
at a dental appointment whose first "love photo" with Armand is an
X-ray of his teeth) besides a blue box with a red sliding door with floral patterns on it stuck with various daggers. Beneath the lower edge of the box, we see the figure of a man in a white shirt: Armand. They're rehearsing for a magic show for Alix's 8-year-old daughter's birthday the following Wednesday. In the middle of the rehearsal, a cell phone rang. It was passed to him. He spoke, He had to explain that he sounded weird on the phone because he was in a sort of "room". He learned that Berthe is dead. Berthe is his own grand mother living then in a retirement home. After receiving the call, he got his head out of the box and sat down. He began to reminisce that lately, he had not been paying as much attention to his grand mother as he should, saying how independent, how secretive she had been and how she always insisted on good form.Tears welled up in his eyes. But when asked, he said it was nothing and that he was OK. They made love. Then he went back to his place of work, a little pharmacy in Chatou (a small town in France) using a tiny motorised step board on wheels the manoeuvring of which he appeared to have completely mastered.There we find him talking to his wife and partner Hélène Lebrecq  (Isabelle Candelier) who asked how it was. In their conversation, we learn that they were working on their separation but found it was so difficult because they seemed to have gotten used to each other for such a long time. They had to carry on their conversation amidst constant interruption by I-phone SMS text messages of love from and to Alix which Armand had to squeeze in with great difficulties between the constrained space between packets of pills and other medicine inside drawers mounted on sliding metallic shelves of his pharmacy, either to read and to answer  She said that the thought having breakfast every morning without Armand was unthinkable. They felt bad and whilst taking a break to get a breath of fresh air outside of their little pharmacy, we hear Hélène's self-assertive and domineering mother Suzanne (Catherine Hiegel ) living above their pharmacy shouting through the window that she hadn't paid her rent for two months but  thinking that Armand was not around, she told her daughter that she was of the strong opinion that Armand should give his granny a "grand burial" and for that purpose had found the name of a good funeral home. We see Armand making signs of protest and ridicule under the verandah against Hélène's "mother superior". The search for a funeral home had to begin in earnest.

Armand searched on the internet, tried the telephone numbers on some of them and got responses from pre-taped telephone messages with people speaking foreign accented French and when he finally got through to a human person, he stated his requirements and got numerous options in incomprehensible French. Finally he decided to go to an ultra hi-tech looking funeral parlor, the "Definitiv". He wanted to know if a funeral could be arranged for Tuesday or Thursday in order not to clash with the birthday of his girl friend's daughter. Whilst waiting for his turn. He was offered wine and biscuit. He looked surprised. He tasted it. It was good. Opposite him sat an elegant lady in black reading a magazine. They looked at each other politely. They did not say anything to each other. Then she cried. Then we see her pulling out a paper handkerchief from a box (believe it or not) about a foot and a half long to dry her tears with tissues of equal length. Shortly thereafter, he was met by a tall gentlemen in very formal dark suit Charles Rovier-Boubet (Michel Vuillermoz) and shown a variety of coffin in different shapes, colors, sizes all with exotic names and with a running commentary on which political celebrity and entertainment star had chosen which. He said he wanted a small one because his granny was not tall and whilst talking we are shown him in a static shot in which his silhouette fitted perfectly against a white Egyptian mummy type of coffin. He was given a variety of options including one called "The Twilight". The tall gentleman in dark tried to show him a video of it with a laser controlled remote but he had to pass his hand through the laser light above the control many times without success, Armand also tried many times, but with equal result. Finally, the tall gentlemen had to show him what it was on the tiny screen of the "remote control panel", moving his finger across the screen quickly to get a new image and enlarging the image by using his thumbing and index finger like what we do with our own I-phone.But we see only flash of greenish white light upon their faces each time we got a new image was supposed to appear on the tiny remote control monitor screen. He said he had to think about which option to adopt and tell the gentleman later because he had to discuss the matter with others. Before the introduction was completed, we suddenly see Alix appearing behind one of the coffins making signs to him and he replied the same manner, aided only by silent words on his lips. When they finally got the chance to talk, Alix said she thought she should help him.

In the end, Armand decided against using that high-tech funeral service and used a simple family type funeral parlor which he found accidentally in a cemetery close to the high-tech funeral home. He got to talking to one of two  undertakers there then in the process of putting the final touches to a tomb and learned that they are developing a profitable new line of business through the internet catering specially for the coffins and burials for all kinds of pets. He asked if they could find him a spot for Tuesday because the other funeral home could only give him Wednesday. It was OK. So he decided to use them. But in the end, his new undertaker got an accident on the road and the funeral had to take place on Wednesday, ending up with "mother superior" stepping in and using the high-tech funeral service using the expensive and pompous "Twilight" ceremony. In the middle of the funeral speech, interrupted by the irrelevant demands of his own  senile and alcoholic father's demand for more drinks, Armand broke down and was just rambling about how little he knew about her granny, and how life and death, love and secret loves of his granny which he discovered from reading the words of affection exchanged between her and her lover even after her marriage, which she carefully kept in a  a box of letters, postcards and telegrams whilst going through her personal effects after being stranded at the retirement home on account of his chosen undertaker's road mishap. which ironically forced him to have the funeral on Wednesday, after all.The film ends by Armand going to the party of Alix's daughter in which they performed the trick about the disappearing magician which Alix and he were practising at the opening of the film. When Alix lowered the red cloth above the box in which he was locked, expecting Armand to appear beside her, we see that Armand had magically "disappeared" altogether, leaving behind only a blue cloth at the bottom of the box.

The film is not just a caricature of the often commercially motivated exaggerated respect the living pays to the dead but also about the kind of petty incidents of everyday contemporary life which show how genuine love, the force of habit, the tiny hypocrisies which one has to invent for the sake of good form and politeness are mixed with the little joys and sorrows in the often hilarious attempts a man struggles to make to reconcile the complexities of a life caught between his love for two women, his wife and his mistress, who both love him and of a man torn between his pharmacy and his love of magic, between his love for the daughter of his mistress and his own son Vincent who spends all his time in front of the computer screen playing video game and how in the end, everything including life and death are so mixed up that it is difficult to tell who is right, who is wrong where, when, to whom, a bit like the magic which we see at the start of the film, something which we try very hard but clumsily to conjure. What is reality? What is love,? What is folly? What is illusion? What is magic?  What is life? What is death?  Does it matter?   

The acting is good, the dialogues chosen with great sensitivity, the angle of this story done a million times by others, the unusual mix of tenderness and irony excellent, the cinematography and music unremarkable. As the film ends, we see Berthe's ashes being thrown into the air into a river, the way the magical flower used by Alix's daughter in her performance at her birthday party floated gently above the same river. A thoughtful ending to a very French "comedy".  Is the opening scene where we see Armand negotiating  with a certain finesse between the narrow streets of Chatou between his mistress's house and that of his pharmacy with his waiting wife the very image of Armand's life? Is the scene where Armand caught his son flunking his philosophy test without telling him  when he put in a slip shod paper when asked to write on the subject "Qu'est ce que  "vouloir"?" (What is want/desire/ will?) a key to what it is that Bruno Podalydès wishes to explore in this film? Is the scene where he sat on a lovely little field mouse on the garden of his granny's retirement home meant to suggest something about the nature of human life too? To say the least, it's an ambiguous film, not totally burlesque and certainly not slapstick and yet not totally black nor white either. I do not know whether that's deliberate. There is a certain unsteady balance: the film seems poised precariously between sadness and irony, between seriousness and quiet hilarity, between magic and reality. One can't really put one's finger on what Bruno Podalydès really wanted to do. But then, why should there always be a definitive answer, one way or another? Is "Definitv" really the end of Berthe's life or for that matter, the true end of the film?