All moves I loved you can check out ‘My Favorites’ tag. Now I’d like to talk about the one I’ve watched right now. This is J’ai toujours rêvé d’être un”.
This film by French film director and screenwriter Samuel Benshetri “I always wanted to be a gangster” consists of four stories where each of them is the story about people who tried to become real gangsters, but could not. Every time desperate heroes have to make a choice between an honest poverty and crime they cant choose crime because comic absurdity keep them from the fatal step. All of them are joined by the fact that most of their time they spend in a cheap roadside cafe. “I always wanted to be a gangster” is tragicomedy, recalling images of Chaplin’s personages which make people laugh through their tears. Samuel Benshetri knows how to make so without falling in vulgarity.
The movie starts from the classic gag: man in pantyhose on his head hits the telegraph-pole and falls down. This is easiest way to using the situation comedy make people to laugh but actually it’s not so easy. Benshetri skillfully manipulates emotions of spectators, making them not only laugh, but also compassionate. Here is gangster-loser who is trying to rob a roadside cafe, but fails, getting acquainted with the beautiful waitress. Or the two intelligent-looking men stealing the girl-emo, which greatly complicates the life of kidnappers. There are elderly gangsters among inhabitants of the cafe which had a plan to kill their old gangster-friend at his own request, and two aged, forgotten rocker who still decide which of them was better.
Ther picture is created very stylish in black and white fool of quotations: here and Tarantino’s cafe, as in “Pulp Fiction” and the long, somewhat strange dialogues, and Jim Jarmusch’s style strange dialogs, and flashbacks made in the style of early Chaplin. But Benshetri is not trying to disguise references on their favorite characters. A gangster theme is just a way allowing to recall one more time that life is not easy and simular problems are familiar to every citizen of any city, and such stories could happen anywhere, anytime. It appears that even if life is unbearably heavy, not everyone can make a step over at this point it is important what is the hero’s soul, but not what he has in his pocket. All inhabitants of this cafe are infinitely good and charming people.
