All language subtitles for La vie comme ça (1978) - Preface by Luc Moullet.eng

La vie comme �a is the first film
Jean-Claude Brisseau made

on a professional basis.

In this film, Brisseau inserted
a lot of behavioural phenomena

which he had noticed
in the course of his career

as a teacher in the Parisian suburbs.

At first it seems like a disorganised
catalogue of observations

of the most traumatic scenes
of life in Bagnolet.

The dramatic elements,
though drawn from reality,

are concentrated in an unreal
and very sensationalist fashion.

And then, little by little,
via the monstrous and the derisory,

the structure of the film
begins to emerge

as the action closes in
around the main character, Agn�s.

La vie comme �a
draws an implacable line:

the hell that is Bagnolet,

the inexorable fate of the residents
of its housing estates,

Greek tragedy transposed
into the 93rd d�partement..

The film is punctuated
by violent deaths,

defenestrations,
noted mostly with indifference

by people who have become blas�
in the face of these constant dramas.

I will never forget the teenager
endlessly circling on his bike

around the corpse of a woman
who has just jumped from a high window.

There is not yet that which becomes
evident in Brisseau's later work:

the mix of sordid naturalism
and the dreamlike.

Although the excessive accumulation
of dramatic elements

verges on the dreamlike.

The film, shot in 1979,

was the first to show and denounce

the practice known
as 'the golden cupboard'.

In a company,
when the boss wanted to get rid

of an employee
he didn't have the right to sack,

he'd put her alone in a little room,
either with nothing at all to do

or with a completely pointless task.

She'd get constantly hassled
until she either cracked or resigned.

Brisseau exposes
the omnipresence of idiotic tasks,

for example,
constantly stamping things

or compiling documents into bundles,
only to throw them in the bin.

The lady responsible
for the stamping is Rosette.

This was her first film,

before she became one of
Eric Rohmer's favourite actresses,

notably in Le rayon vert,
Lion d'Or at Venice,

and, before she moved on to novels,
the remarkable Le grand m�chant. p�re.

Brisseau also shows the hoops one has
to jump through to get a council flat.

In contrast,
he portrays the solidarity

among women working in a company.

With great wisdom, Brisseau
chooses not to finish his scenes

when the viewer knows exactly
what is going to happen.

Brisseau doesn't explain everything.

The viewer can read between the lines,
between the shots.

Brisseau shows the head
of the union representative

which barely rises above
a bar in the foreground

when he is confronting the boss.

A visual symbol to translate the
impossibility of making himself heard.

An unexpected figure:
the false interview

in which a character directly
expresses how he feels

as if responding to a journalist
of whom there is no other evidence.

Very powerful didacticism.

A quarter of a century before the
current troubles in the Paris suburbs,

Jean-Claude Brisseau seems to have said
all there is to say on the issue.