La vie est un roman

Watching the first few moments, you realize it's going to be a parody - and certainly it *is* a parody, but I'm not sure of what (a fairy tale? an opera? a Hollywoodian C-movie? - if there was something like that), and I can assure you it's not worth watching. It's simply a pointless film (cf. a good parody is everything but pointless), with pretentious, shallow speeches of extremely sketchy characters. It's like a commedia dell'arte. Or better, it's like a botched commedia dell'arte. And the score... sung in an intentionally incompetent way (something Greenaway will use much more efficiently), it *is* painful to listen to (unless one wears some sate-of-the-art earplugs, haha). Go for quality movies (e.g. A. Mitta's How Czar Peter the Great Married Off His Moor, 1976) and steer clear of this mistake.