

User Score
2 votes
As per usual, Cadinot sees our universe differently. Making things happen, having the audacity to obtain what one wants or who one desires: c'est la vie! Letting oneself be carried by the general motion and voluntarily submitting oneself to the desires of others: c'est la vie! Creating a future by breaking a past choice: c'est la vie! Stopping everything and taking time to take and give intense pleasure to two or three people wherever one happens to be: c'est la vie! In a city, the young man, a married workman, a librarian, a nurse, a clerk - each in turn come up against the reality of existence! Let yourself be penetrated! It's our life! This film takes you even further than "Double en Jeu".
Director
Writer
Status
Released
Original Language
FR
Roughly chronological, from 3/96 to 11/96, with a coda in spring of 1997: inside compounds of Aum Shinrikyo, a Buddhist sect led by Shoko Asahara. (Members confessed to a murderous sarin attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995.) We see what they eat, where they sleep, and how they respond to media scrutiny, on-going trials, the shrinking of their fortunes, and the criticism of society. Central focus is placed on Hiroshi Araki, a young man who finds himself elevated to chief spokesman for Aum after its leaders are arrested. Araki faces extreme hostility from the Japanese public, who find it hard to believe that most followers of the cult had no idea of the attacks and even harder to understand why these followers remain devoted to the religion, if not the violence.