The Dandelions (Du Vent dans mes mollets) (兩腳生風)

       

    
              Rachel drawing a picture of Madame Trebla at her office

Valerie and Rachel watching their teachers making love

From left: grannny, Colette & Michel and Rachel at home

Valérie  and Rachel playacting

Valérie  and Rachel

The two copines blowing dandelion feathers

After two rather heavy films, it's certainly a most welcoming experience to see the Carine Tardieu's comedy "The Dandelions (Du vent dans mes mollets), adapted for the screen by Raphaële Moussafi from a memoire and starring Agnès Jaoui as Colette Gladstein, the wife of Tunisien-Jew Michel Gladstein(Denis Podalydès ) now living in a small town in 1980's France with her heavily made up but sickly looking mother Judith Magre who moved in with the Gladstein  from a retirement home ostensibly because of an illness which may strike her down any time and who now shares her room with 8 year old Rachel (Juliette Gombert)

It's a really funny film about how 9-year-old Rcahel, the only child in the family found it suffocating to live in a house with her over-protective mother, a silent but hawkish grandmother and a careless and carefree and almost absent father and was dying of boredom and who dreamt that it might be better to be an orphan. As the film opens, we see Rachel struggling on a typewriter to write a letter to Madame Trebla (Isabella Rossellini ), her child psychiatrist, who told her that she could write to her whenever she feels a bout of grand unhappiness. We are then shown how she went to school late because her mother would insist on waiting for the traffic lights to turn green on a traffic free road and then had to beg for the school gate to be opened from a voice on a speaker phone at the school entrance, how she had no place to sit in the class by Madame Danielle (Elsa Lepoivre)  but was offered a seat beside one Valérie (Anna Lemarchand)    ...      a rather talkative and free girl who struck up an instant friendship with her and led her to see the rendezvous of Madame Danielle with the school's sports teacher Monsieur Fadiga (Jean-Baptiste Tiemele) at the toilet of the staff room, hiding behind two sides its door, lying on the ground with just sufficient of their little heads sticking out to observe the feet of and the heads the two lovers and to hear what they were saying to each other and then hiding under a table when they came out to chit chat.

Soon it was Rachel 9th birthday and her mother fussed about giving her a birthday party but no one came except Valérie and her mom Catherine (Isabelle Carré)  because everybody in her class went to the birthday party of another girl in the same class and her family had to eat the leftovers for the next few days. Catherine asked Rachel to show her her room. She was glad to be free from the boredom of adult conversation and the two of them had a marvellous time jumping up and down Rachel's granny's bed and exchanging girlie jokes. Catherine was precocious and soon the two were making up shows with puppets talking adult love talk which they only half understand. Rachel developed a crush for Catherine's brother and imagine getting married to him whilst Catherine developed a similar crush for Rachel's dad. After getting to know Valéry's mom, Michel, himself a plumber, started to go to her house under the pretext of picking up Rachel during her visits and would stay there to chat with the hippie type Catherine until very late to escape from the over-attention of his increasingly fatty wife even began to fix up first her light bulb and then her kitchen. It looked as if they were developing a more than a pure friendly relationship but he never really crossed the boundary.