One, Two, Three, Freeze (1993)

Fantastic!

Brilliant and touching

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Memory and longing can make of our lives a continuous present tense in which those we've lost have dinner with us, in which we can call them from the grave whenever we wish, in which we can kill them as often as we like. And if we are the pretty, hyperactive daughter of demented (Italian? Spanish?) mother and pastis-drowned father, living in a nightmare suburban project in Marseilles among the walking driftwood and the detritus of loving humanity, in which crime is a career and rape a rite of passage, we are seven, seventeen, twenty-seven in the same moment while the hybrid sounds of Euro/Algerian/Camerounian music, chewing, cursing, laughing, fighting, sexing, loving, accompany us perpetually as in the old melodrama, except that it is so alive, funny, moving, devastating and rescuing all at once that we are enthralled and left with the happy/sad feeling of a life lived. A movie to be lived in and remembered with fondness.

I used to look forward to Blier, I think because he knew how to surprise. Then his two regulars moved on. Patrick Dewaere died. Depardieu, working constantly and still talented, became fat and rich. Blier continued to turn out idiosyncratic works, but eventually I was reading about them in the Cahiers more often I could see them in this country.What I used to anticipate, was a single startling thought exercise transformed into an hour-and-a-half-long conversation between usually three, maybe four, at least slightly frantic individuals: Get Out Your Handkerchiefs; Buffet Froid; Beau Pere; My Best Friend's Girl; Too Beautiful for You. Un, Deux, Trois, Soleil, disappointed me a little because it lacks the earlier films' challenging premises. In it, Blier experiments with style. It's an exercise in form more than in thought. Though it surprises constantly, it poses nothing as intriguing as those older films' puzzles.Nearly everything in this film, even adults playing themselves as children and the dead getting in their two cents and more long after they're cold, is some degree of cliché. That's not to fault Blier. His title announces as much: 1…2…3…Boo! Cliché...cliché...cliché...Soleil! Drunken Pa, domineering mother, boring husband, exiting past fling, hot school teacher(Where are the rest of the girls in the class?), incapable-of-guilt bar-keeper. The surprises, and nearly the only real pleasure, come from the clichés' arrangement, from distortions in narrative order.Though it's set up mid-film, with references to the 722 door, Mastroianni's big scene at the finish struck me as a producer's move, not a director's. This wasn't Mastroianni's film. It was Anouk Grinberg's (Victorine). Any of many actors could have played his role. There was no need for the character to be Italian. Grinberg began and should have finished the film.

The early life of a girl in multiracial poor suburbs of Marseilles. An original vision of the tough life of a girl between 12 and 25, facing a harsh initiation to adulthood. Probably to show that she had no real childhood between an irresponsible mother, a drunk father (Marcello Mastroiani at his best) and gangs of ruthless boys, the girl at different ages (about 12, 15, 18, 20 and 25) is played by Anouk Grinberg. She does a good job but can't avoid a few stereotypes. In addition, the various moments of her life are interlaced in a kind of stream of consciousness and dead people that she loved reappear, as they still live in her memory. A fairly dark picture where occasional rays of sun shine even more brightly. Great music by Khaled.

This is a one of the most underrated movies of all time. It's worth viewing if only for the excellent performance of Marcello Mastroianni. It tells the story of Victorine, a girl living in a suburb of a big city. The movie has a surreal undertone and does not explain everything so the viewer can use their own imagination to fill in the gaps. A special mention for the suberb music by Khaled.