Going AWOL

Life Upside Down. Slight, smiling Jacques (Charles Denner) seems to be an ordinary little man working in an ordinary little real estate office in Paris. He lives with Viviane (Anna Gaylor), an ordinary little model who loves to look at herself in commercials and magazine ads. While taking a bath one afternoon, Jacques experiences a kind of ecstasy of self-absorption so powerful that he fails to notice that Viviane has come home and is chattering away at him. Later, he feels something of the same blissful detachment when he leaves a group of friends in a restaurant and begins to play a pinball machine.

Jacques marries Viviane and now proceeds to go AWOL from the world around him. He abruptly leaves the wedding party given by his boss. Fired for his rudeness, he begins to spend his days wandering contentedly by himself. He gazes at things for hours until they lose their conventional reality--an effect brilliantly conveyed by a surrealistic camera that converts a slice of bread into a mysterious mass of caverns, an iron lamp base into a writhing monster.

Eventually, Jacques learns that he can see through things as though they do not exist. He can make people disappear at will; he walks raptly through the daylit Paris streets and the roaring Metro without seeing a soul. Time loses its meaning; he comes home one evening to discover to his mild surprise that he has been away for three whole days.

In despair and incomprehension, convinced that he has another girl, Viviane makes an unsuccessful suicide attempt, then leaves him. Jacques delightedly removes all the furniture but a bed and a table and sits on the floor. He never goes out, eats almost nothing. He explains to a visiting doctor that he has achieved a new clarity of consciousness and awareness of the true nature of things. Eventually, the doctor commits Jacques to a luxurious mental hospital, where he sits contemplating on the floor in a private room, nibbling occasionally from a bowl of fruit. He is completely happy. "I have got the better of them," he murmurs as the picture ends.

Has he? Writer-Director Alain Jessua raises the question by contrasting the calm, collected self-sufficiency of Jacques with the suffering of compulsive, confused normal people. Is he suggesting that the contemplative life in the modern world can only be lived in the loony bin--or that the only way to be happy is to be crazy? Jessua lets the audience decide for itself. In any case, Actor Denner, who has the hawk nose and almond eyes of a Persian miniature, is a most engaging madman.

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