Life Is Ours (1936) User Reviews

Comrades!

[DoorsofDylan · 5/10 · 19 September 2023]

Dazzled by Paris Frills (also reviewed), I decided that I would double bill it with another title by film maker Jacques Becker. Looking down the list of credits, I spotted a movie from Becker that I had not heard of before, leading to me joining the comrades.

View on the film:

Produced the year that Popular Front won the election, and directed by a collective, (with Jean Renoir prominently keeping everything on track) the directors capture the growing fear of what was happening in Germany, with one of the most striking sequences being 1000's of WWI veterans marching to stop fascists from claiming The Unknown Solider.

Along with speeches made by people fearing another world war, the directors go all-in on pushing propaganda for the French Communist Party, with long segments of the movie based around showing the full speeches of FCP members.

Taking an anthology approach, and featuring a debut performance from the lovely Madeleine Sologne, (with cameos also from Becker and Renoir) the collective writers/directors emphasis the themes of the speeches with compact short tales, from the rules of the game being laid out by the bourgeoisie who control a huge part of France's industrial output, to following a man waiting in line to be served at a soup kitchen.

So comrades,come rally/And the last fight let us face...

[dbdumonteil · 25 May 2006]

Many directors worked on this film ,the most famous is Jean Renoir -who was not part of the Communist Party but whose name was put forward by poet Louis Aragon- ,but there is also Jacques Becker and one of the Nouvelle Vague's numerous betes noires,Jean-Paul Le Chanois.It is very difficult to tell who did what.I will not try.The movie was not really theatrically released before 1969 (the year after May 68).

"La vie est à nous" predates Godard's "Cinema Verité" ("la Chinoise" "Tout va Bien" etc)by thirty years but do not panic.It is not as stodgy as JLG's lectures.

Of course it's basically a propaganda movie and it might interest only people who are fans of the directors I mention(and completists at that).It is made of sketches ,telling stories of everyday life: a school teacher tells his pupils about their country's national wealth,but he sadly concludes:"you'll never take advantage of them " Blame it on the 200 families who possess all the money.A photo album shows some of them,notably the Schneider family,whose patriarch Eugene was an industrialist and politician of the nineteenth century (he owned his own factory when he was about 30,thanks essentially to his wife's dowry) Then there are several tales of misfortune:

-A working man is fired.

-Another one is on the dole although he is an educated man.

-A farm is put up for auction.(this segment will remind fans of of "little house (in the prairie)" one of its episodes!!

And every time,the commies come to the rescue! The film ends with speeches by the then big names in the party .It's rather boring.

For historians and sociologists.

Faux Goose? or Proper Gander?

[writers_reign · 4/10 · 16 November 2012]

It's probably fair to say that only historians and/or history students will have any interest in this title today and it's equally impossible to view it as it would have been viewed when it was topical - although even then it wasn't released in the accepted sense of the word. The overall feel is of a documentary rather than a feature film and a biased documentary at that, not that it pretends to be anything else and as an end credit has it the film was produced by the Communist party. Produced the same year the Front Populaire won the general election in France the film embodies the main credo of the Populaire Front, that of workers banding themselves into 'collectives' and sorting out the social evils at a strike ... oops, sorry, at a stroke. Just about everybody and his Uncle Max worked on it and you know what they say about things produced by committees ...