Musée haut, musée bas (2008)
Directed by Jean-Michel Ribes

Film Review

Comedy is a strange beast.  Show it to one audience and it provokes merely grudging ennui and annoyance.  Show it to another and the howls of amusement it evokes may well bring the roof down.  Like all art, its raison d'être depends on being observed, and when it is observed the reaction it provokes is as wildly variable and unpredictable as the human personality itself.  It is this essential relationship between art and the observer (without which art ceases to have any intrinsic value) which agent provocateur director Jean-Michel Ribes explores, in his own inimitably off-the-wall way, in this wondrously madcap comedy, an admirable reworking of his popular Paris stage play.

Musée haut, musée bas is provocative and thought-provoking, but mercifully it doesn't succumb to the pretentious polemicising for which those connected with the art world are famously renowned.  Jean-Michel Ribes does not set out to make a deep point about the value of art or how art is misunderstood by contemporary society.  Rather, he is merely poking mischievous fun at the ludicrous behaviours which art engenders, by virtue of the fact that it is something which exists outside our everyday experiences.  We no longer know what art is, so we deify it, worship it unquestioningly in vast cathedral-like constructions, unable to distinguish the worthless tat from the old masters.  How can we resist the lure of Kandinsky (even though we haven't a clue what his art is meant to represent)?  Forget religion, sex and the afterlife.  The ultimate mystery our society has to confront is art.  Just what is it and what is it for?

One thing the film has great fun with is the notion that we no longer know where the boundary lies between life and art.  With their critic-baiting installations, Tracey Emin and her breed of modern artists have effectively abolished the distinction between reality and art's representation of reality (if it ever existed), and so the act of strangling to death one's mother (to cite one of the more extreme examples of Ribes' colourful thesis) is no longer murder but the supreme act of artistic expression, and as likely a recipient of the Turner Prize as a wigwam made from llama droppings or a stack of baked bean tins arranged to resemble the genitalia of a squashed porcupine.   Ribes takes things to their logical extreme when he makes us aware that it is the visitors to the museum who are the art, not the dead things they come to look at.  It is people, you and me, who make up the ultimate art installation as we drench ourselves in meaningless superlatives in front of a painting by Gauguin (whilst failing to pronounce his name correctly) and are transcended by a paroxysm of delight when we mistake a toilet-roll holder for the most cogent expression of man's longing for the divine.

One area where Jean-Michel Ribes swims against the tide (literally, as it turns out, thanks to some impressive CGI effects work) is in his pretty aggressive nature bashing.  In stark contrast to today's tree-hugging politicians, Ribes portrays Nature as something that is to be feared not revered, something that man must always fight against if he is to survive, be it as an individual or as a species.  Michel Blanc's hilarious plant-hating curator may be a grotesque caricature but it prompts us to reflect on whether our present environmental concerns are well-judged or will merely hasten our demise.  It also poses the invidious question - which is more beautiful, a natural landscape or an inspired artist's representation of the same?  Would we care if we lost the former if we still had the latter (and the postcards we can make from it)?  Or would we not shed many more tears if nature were to run amok and decimate the artistic marvels that man has striven to create over the past millennia?

Musée haut, musée bas does indeed offer plenty of food for thought, but it is also highly entertaining and, as it flits from one absurd situation to another, assisted by an astounding all-star cast, it is almost as hard to take in as a twenty-minute sprint through the Louvre.  The humour by and large has a distinctly British feel to it, which could explain why the film received mixed reviews in France but tended to do better elsewhere.  You can sense the ghost of Monty Python in virtually every scene, particularly so in the sequence in which a group of art gallery visitors become art exhibits and then later in The Poseidon Adventure-like climax.  Like any self-respecting museum, Musée haut, musée bas is so stuffed with treasures that no one can possibly take it all in in a single viewing.  Luckily, thanks to the miracles of modern science (well, the DVD player at least), we can always go back and take a more leisurely look at the weird delights that Jean-Michel Ribes has assembled for us in his most peculiar of museums.  Just be aware that, as you do so, you may end up being short-listed for the Turner Prize...

Film Synopsis

Just what exactly is a museum?  Tourists hasten from one exhibition to another, devouring assorted fragments of culture like pigs gorging on scraps.  More discriminating visitors are transported to the heights of sublime ecstasy by the bits of tat that take their fancy, whilst others drive themselves insane trying to find the original of the poster that adorns their bathroom.  A minister considers the appropriate thing to say in front of a photographic display of sexual organs, whilst the curator fails dismally to overcome his manic phobia of plants and all things natural.  A museum is not the collection of dead things on the walls or in the display cabinets, but the teeming mass of humanity that fills the crowded salons...