After his successful `Une époque formidable', a comedy about homeless people, Gérard Jugnot came back with another, even more ambitious, comedy, about the Balkanic wars (though the place is left unnamed). A group of French tourists, vacationing in a Mediterranean island, is caught in the middle of a war they didn't even know about. In a few hours, they learn to set aside their former troubles (pending divorce, loneliness, ageing) so that they can cope with important matters, like avoiding to get killed or fishing corpses in a swimming pool. While the movie is not entirely satisfying (every character learns the usual lesson about what's really important in life, and the war they're in is too theoretical to be convincing), it explores a few new themes, like our (Western Europeans) ambiguous feelings about the Yugoslavian tragedies (and foreign tragedies in general), or the idea that we (Western Europeans) tend to live in a bubble that's bound to explode. Jugnot has certainly to be credited for taking comedy out of its usual tracks.
Review of Blue Helmet
