This is par excellence the kind of film which it's trendy to put disparagement on.This is par excellence the kind of film the new wavelet buffs laugh at .This is par excellence the kind of movie the educated clever people,those who know Rivette,Godard and Rohmer by heart, love to put down.(with notable exceptions of course).
Jean-Paul Le Chanois was a generous director whose humanism ,philanthropism and social concerns cannot be called into question."Sans Laisser d'Adresse" is just that: love for the human being,sympathy for the feeble.Once I wrote a comment on another Le Chanois's film "le Cas Du Docteur Laurent" .I got disastrous feedback.
Bernard Blier -as good as ever- portrays a taxi driver whose passenger, Thérèse (a moving Daniele Delorme) is looking for mister Forrestier.However this man seems nowhere to be found;so Le Chanois takes us on a tour in Paris,from an union meeting to a dentist's office ,from a paper (office) to a club in Saint-Germain-des-Prés where a young Juliette Gréco sings "la Fiancée du Prestidigitateur" (the conjurer's fiancée).And after a while we realize the man the girl's looking for is none other than a married lady killer and that she's got a baby with her ,a baby whose father....
This is popular nay populist cinema in the noblest sense of the term.The screenplay involves many many characters (as Le Chanois' s previous work "Agence Matrimoniale" did),and it's a wonder one remembers most of them after the screening for most of them's appearance does not exceed three or four minutes.
Some say the Nouvelle Vague changed all this "obsolete" art.But Julien Duvivier had already trampled his generation's principles underfoot : in "Sous le Ciel de Paris" ,the year before,he had destroyed the young-girl-coming-from-the-Provinces cliché ;and with his 1952 masterpiece "la Fete à Henriette" ,he would definitively call into question what the highbrows called the "Cinema de Papa".
That said,I watched "Sans Laisser d'Adresse" with a great pleasure.
This is the kind of movie the so-called connoisseurs of the French cinema would not even think of seeing.Don't be like them!
