Manic Monday

Is there a way to depict boredom without boring your audience? Well, if you are writer-director Otar Iosseliani, you call your film Monday Morning and home in on a chainsmoking welder in a no-smoking factory who dies a little more each time that point of the week comes around. Eventually, Vincent (Jacques Bidou) walks away - from his two sons, his bossy but resigned wife, his elderly mother and the various neighbours whose discontents permeate the surrounding buildings.

Jacques goes to Venice, where he links up with a fellow renegade: we see both his travels and the ongoing life at home, its mundanity spiced by childish dramas, teenage love and the desperation of encroaching poverty. The film is too long (although, given the subject matter, maybe that's appropriate) but dotted with moments of incredible sweetness - often the same moments that Iosseliani uses to illustrate his male characters' entertaining acts of disobedience and outright charlatanism.

For, in this world, all the men are delinquent (if creative) fantasists, while the women are practical and hard-working, if understandably dour. And it's their reality that wins out, because - as they know, and their men refuse to accept - no matter how far away you run, Monday morning comes around wherever you are.

Monday Morning (Lundi Matin)
Cert: certPG