Your capacity to enjoy Bruno Podalydés’ Park Benches will depend mostly on whether you enjoy people watching in real life. If no one’s done it yet, let this writer be the first to coin a term for this frustratingly and satisfyingly French film – “observational whimsy”. If the myopic cast of Paul Haggis’ Crash was too much for your palette, here is a lightweight dessert with just a hint of bitterness. Park Benches is an acquired taste though, testing your patience with a determined lack of focus and a cast so large that any fond hope of character development will shrivel up and die within the first half hour.
If there is a main character at the head of the purported cast of 90, it would be Lucie (Florence Muller), an office worker with a fish tank that she locks in a closet and a tendency to slack off. Along with her chatty co-workers, they roll up their blinds one day to discover a bleak banner hanging outside of an anonymous window across the street - "Homme Seul", or “Lonely Man”. Their boss pops in and the film switches gears awkwardly into a territory dominated by farcical misappropriation of the French language – words are misspoken at key moments by skilled thespians, and I suppose that might be funnier if I understood the intricacies of the language slightly better. As it is, Benches remains unfamiliar but not insincere.
Podalydés has an obsession with objects that rivals fellow Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s. The former is seemingly more interested in how people are defined by their favorite things, whether it’s two old men playing backgammon or a customer speaking to a shopkeep at Brico Dream, utilizing terms that foreign in any language. Tiny boats skirt the surface of a park fountain while a man makes paper planes in a lame attempt to score with an object of desire. More consistently, lonely people pretend to talk on cellphones in attempt to foreswear their solitude under the watchful gaze of co-workers or even potential lovers.
Park Benches is unified by three locations, mainly the office where Lucie plies her daily trade, a park nearby and Brico Dream, a shop just this edge of Kaufman-esque. The Brico Dream sequence is probably the most interesting in the film, since we are never entirely sure just what the shop is selling – is it bathroom utilities? Shower equipment? Drills? Pipes? Having rarely frequented home improvement stores, I may be out of my element, but I found the shop, the clientele and especially the busybody boss and his negligent staff very amusing.
There’s an attempt in the film to bring a lived-in quality to the world and the players in it – it’s largely unsuccessful though since it all seems to be elegantly scripted. When a homeless man (played by Eric Elmosnino, star of the Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life) awakes and a blithely goes out his daily ranting routine, it feels set-up and unnatural, but maybe that’s Podalydés’ aim. Nothing about Park Benches feels very fly-on-the-wall since the cast is grouped together poignantly and given scripted lines that they deliver as actors, not off-the-cuff regulars.
In effect, every scene becomes an attempt to glean a little insight and that robs the film of some of the fun that could be had with letting this large a cast roam a bit free. There’s a firm grip on the ongoings and it stifles even the slapstick occasionally. Still, like Airplane, this multi-character farcical dramedy (ok, too much) is eager to please, so if one character set-up doesn’t work, on to the next one.
DVD Bonus Features
A pretty solid collection of more-of-the-same Deleted Scenes (with some adlibbing from the game cast), the trailer for the film and several more that play before the main menu and a Behind The Scenes look at a festival premiere of Park Benches and more.
"Park Benches" is on sale July 26, 2011 and is not rated. Comedy, Foreign, Romance, Romantic-Comedy. Directed by Bruno Podalydes. Written by Bruno Podalydès. Starring Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni, Mathieu Amalric.
