The Big Night

In the middle of an absurd collection of shopping centers lies the Bonzini family's potato restaurant. The two grown-up sons are the aged punk 'Not' (Benoît Poelvoorde) and his bourgeois brother Jean-Pierre (Albert Dupontel), a bed salesman and devoted family man. Then Jean-Pierre suddenly loses his job and the perfect world falls apart at the seams: after an amok-like outburst, the model son ends up in his brother's arms. 'Not' tattoos 'Dead' on Jean-Pierre's forehead, gives him a mohawk hairstyle and introduces him to sweet idleness with a crash course. To the horror of their parents and the neighborhood, the two brothers of the punk duo "Not & Dead" henceforth give the middle finger to the commercially sanctified uniformity.... Without much explanation, the images of the directing duo Benoit Delépine and Gustave Kervern ("Mammuth") tell of a nameless place in France where people become prisoners of an everyday consumerist frenzy. Everything seems to be made the same or adapted. The only way to live life properly again, this delicious anarchic comedy argues, is to revolt. And this is what "Not & Dead" tackles, constantly slipping into wonderfully absurd situations. "Punk is NOT DEAD" - not even in the most desolate industrial area! "Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in postmodern-philosophical punk rock - with bitingly amusing results. As in silent movie comedies, the individual sequences are only loosely linked, with visible breaks. In between, there are punk rock concerts with stage diving from the stage; the brothers are carried into the next sketch, so to speak. The absurd, sitcom-like comedy skewers the saturation of bourgeois life in a loose episodic sequence without becoming overbearing." (" Lexicon of International Film")