Ce jour- là (That Day) | Review

Comedy noir piles on the laughs and the bodies.

Director Raoul Ruiz’s darkly funny comedy boasts a charm that borrows from Hitchcock’s own sense of humor. In Ce jour-là , the internationally known Chilean filmmaker makes a full out exercise of murder being fun time.

This film is everything but normal, with a Twin Peaks allure inside a surreal fairy-tale like setting we get introduced to the angel-like delusional character of Livia (Elsa Zylberstein) in an angel-wings overcoat who sees no evil and hears no evil. Her premonitions of a beautiful day to come arrives when her loose head and spirit that couldn’t hurt a fly meets with an escaped psychotic serial killer Emil (Bernard Giraudeau) and the film wraps itself in a Jack Nicholson’s The Shinning type of nerve. From this point on its hammer time! and the audience finds themselves as a spectator willing to cheer for this business-minded upper-scale family to get hacked to pieces, of course it is the finest and funniest moments of death are a couple of involuntary ones.

Marinated with a twisted sense of humor, Ruiz attacks our funny bone by normalizing the massacre in the same way in which the main two characters come to live it. Zylberstein gives off the perfect sense of cute mindlessness among madness with her hollow face expressions inside a Snow White-like polish. In fact, her character’s reaction inside the hallways and mansion grounds kind of reminded of the equally bizarre setting as in Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad . Even funnier besides a table full of expired guests who get their blood pressure checked out is this subplot that takes us away from the mansion and into the minds of two local detectives who they themselves have lost their bearings as common procedural work gets replaced by a long day of doing absolutely nothing.

Of course, Ce jour-là gets its highest marks for being totally unpredictable and though it trials off into a little too much absurdity and doesn’t get any deeper in subtext, it justifies itself by staying true to its form of amusement. This is a fun little divertissement that is when put simply is a jolly good time.

Rating 3 stars