ELLE COURT, ELLE COURT LA BANLIEUE (SHE RUNS IN THE SUBURBS/ THE SUBURBS ARE EVERYWHERE)

France, 1973, 95 minutes, Colour.
Marthe Keller, Jacques Higelin, Victor Lanoux, Daniel Prevost, Claude Pieplu.
Directed by Gerard Pieres.

The Suburbs Are Everywhere is a domestic drama, focused on life in Paris. It shows the struggle of a young man and woman to set up their home in Paris, cope with their work, cope with the various pressures of life.

The film is attractive, especially with its stars, Marthe Keller and Jacques Higelin. The film was directed by Gerard Pieres who directed only eighteen films over a period of forty years (including the box office action success, Taxi, in 1998). The film is what one might call typically French, typically Parisian.

1. How entertaining a film was this? Why? Did it seem real or exaggerated? Or both? audiences easily identify with these characters? How ironic was the title?

2. Comment on the style of the film - its rather hurried tone, the amount of noise and shouting, the incidents of working life and home? farcical situations, the comedy? Did these all add up to entertaining insight into life in the suburbs? Were some of the characters and situations too much cliche? If so. did this matter? Was the film particularly French, or did it apply to most city dwellers?

3. What was the purpose of the film ? a laugh, a comment on society, criticismof society? All of these? How successful were the film-makers?

4. What was the moral of the story? Marriage in the modern world? The pressures of work? The pressures of mechanisation? The pressures of the city? The pressures of one's neighbours? Moral pressures? How well did the film look into these and make its point?

5. Comment on the visual presentation of city life and its pressures. What were the main ones the film was concerned with? How tellingly?

6. Why did people seem so awful in this film? The character said people were awful.. Were they? Could they be otherwise? Even Marlene and Bernard were awful at times.

7. What insight into modern marriage and love did the film give? Marlene and Bernard and their marriage? The decisions to be married? The ceremony, the hunting for a house or for flats (and the awful satire here?) The neighbours, work, (the irony of the couple who met only in the paesing trains), the noise and the salesman? The temptations to infidelity and to desperation? How real were these? Did the happy ending show that they could be overcome? Convincingly?

8. How did the film show the ups and downs of the central couple? How enjoyable were these, yet how real?

9. What did the neighbours add to the film? The young couple with the boorish husband, the flighty wife, her adultery and her being caught, the baby being looked after downstairs, her support of Marlene? How ordinary were these people and how well were they observed?

10. The policeman and his wife - caricatures? How awful? The wife stealing and egging the husband on? The husband and his shouting, his comment on the riots, his model planes? Were these people real and their problems real?

11. The satire on the bosses - and taking pills, the piles of transferring people etc?

12. The waitresses at the restaurant where Bernard stopped - their looking for pickups, their behaviour towards wives etc.? Was this real of exaggerated? Was the waitress attractive enough for Bernard to walk out?

13. Was the film serious in its presentation of depression and suicide? Could you believe that Marlene would attempt suicide? How realistic was the ambulance chase to the hospital? Even if this was not real, what point was being made? Effectively?

14. How well did the film blend satire and comedy? Which details appealed to you most and illustrated this best?