Les Favoris de la lune

Fetching a price in Les Favoris de la lune

Otar Iosseliani, a Georgian filmmaker who died just a year ago, has gone largely unheralded in the English speaking world. Les Favoris de la lune, his first feature after emigrating to France in 1982, won a jury prize in Venice, but, like most of his films, failed to make much of an impact outside continental Europe. Most of the English or American reviews of it I could dig up, like those by Neil Young and Vincent Canby, gave it the back of their hand, but I found the film to be spritely and enormously entertaining.

This 1984 film follows the lives of twenty or so characters, from the haute bourgeoisie to beggars, in then present day Paris. The films also leapfrogs across time as it follows the modern provenance of a 19th century painting and some 18th century crockery. The interlacing stories has brought comparisons to the films of Robert Altman and I noted some traces of Blake Edwards in how Iosseliani and co-scenarist Gérard Brach, most famous for his scripts for Roman Polanski, inject tart observations on sexism, racism, and classism within the framework of an absurdist farce. Les Favoris de la lune focuses on the exchange of commerce between people by both accepted and nefarious means. Everyone is on the make for financial and sexual gain. The matter of fact portrayal of sex workers tips us that the director's sympathy is with the dispossessed. The film is not dissimilar to Robert Bresson's 1983 masterpiece L'Argent, if Bresson had had a sense of humor. Some have criticized the director for being more interested in objects than people, but that misses the point. Iosseliani bluntly described the film as "...an attack on those who seek to fill the void around them with a false culture of objects and possessions."

I feel that the most obvious comparison of this film is to the work of Luis Buñuel, a point seized upon by Vincent Canby in his 1985 New York Times pan of the film. Certainly Iosseliani wants to takes pokes at the European bourgeoisie just like the Spanish master, but there are also other areas of intersection: Surrealism, Marxism, terrorism, voyeurism, and, avoiding the isms for a sec, carnivorous plants. Iosseliani also slips in portents of the surveillance state which was unforeseen in Bunuel's ouevre. Canby was perhaps partially right in that Les Favoris... is not quite as strong as Belle du Jour or The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but what films are? I prefer Les Favoris de la lune to such late Buñuel efforts as Tristana, The Phantom of Liberty, and even That Obscure Object of Desire.

Iosseliani works wonders with his cast of figures who, mostly, only had periphereal film careers. The sole castmate who was sprinkled with stardust is the young Mathieu Amalric who plays a neophyte hoodlum. However, this is a film that stresses ensemble playing over star turns. The essence of this anarchic film is best summed up by Shakespearean quote from Henry IV  Part 1 which inspired Les Favoris de la lune's title and which is cited within the film.

                        Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon,

                        and let men say we be men of good government, being governed,

                        as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress of the moon, under

                        whose countenance we steal.

Falstaff's tribute to his criminal cohorts sums up the unruly energies governing Iosseliani's film.