Mouton (2014)
Directed by Gilles Deroo, Marianne Pistone

Film Review

Mouton, an idiosyncratic debut feature from Gilles Deroo and Marianne Pistone, has all the hallmarks of a bold but flawed exercise in cinéma vérité - one which, lacking the courage of its convictions or any real sense of purpose, seems to have succumbed to a fatal dose of self-conscious whimsy and ends up looking weirdly like a half-hearted parody of a Bruno Dumont film.  Shot on 16mm film with a cast of capable non-professional actors, Mouton certainly has the distinctive austere grittiness of a Dumont or Dardenne brothers film, but there is something missing, some essential quality that will repay the spectator's attention and make the whole thing worthwhile.  It's not at all clear what the film is meant to be about.  Is it a sombre reflection on the pointlessness of existence in a godless universe?   Is it intended to remind us of the inter-connectedness of our lives, showing how we are diminished when someone we know is taken from us?  Or is it something less profound, a bland still life into which we may read what we choose?

Mouton is - literally - a film of two halves, the first half being by far the most digestible.  Adopting a raw documentary style, the film's authors present a grimly authentic slice of life which dwells languorously on the humdrum banalities of life in the dullest of French seaside towns.  At the centre of this solemn meditation on the ordinariness of existence is an easily victimised young man (nicknamed 'Mouton' for reasons that are never given) whose main function appears to be to provide the narrative with a convenient sacrificial lamb.  Just when we begin to warm to Mouton and take an interest in his spectacularly uneventful life he is snatched from us.  It's like the shower scene in Psycho all over again.  Unfortunately, there is no Anthony Perkins to make up for the ejection of Janet Leigh.  And no shower.

Mouton's sudden and dramatic removal from the picture - glimpsed only in long shot as if it were an event of no consequence - allows the film to progress to its second half, which is essentially more of the same, but with a Mouton-shaped hole impinging to varying degrees on the emotional lives of the dead man's acquaintances. The rambling realism of the film's first half is brutally tamed, thanks to the imposition of an ordered series of chapters introduced by title cards and voice over narration.  It is here that the film lets go the very quality that made the first half endurable - a crisp sense of spontaneity.  With the likeable Mouton out of the frame the film that bears his name becomes tediously episodic and repetitive.  Deroo and Pistone deserve some credit for attempting something a little different but you can't help feeling that their creativity needs to be more tightly focussed in order to have the impact it merits.

Film Synopsis

17-year-old Aurélien, known to his friends as Mouton, is happily employed at a fish restaurant in Courseulles-sur-Mer, a small town on the Normandy coast.  His is a simple but contented life which ends in a tragic accident three years later at a ball in honour of Sainte-Anne.  Now that Mouton has gone the friends that remain must come to terms with his loss...