Life is a long, quiet river: the little story behind the cult film

Etienne Chatiliez’s comedy returns this Friday evening on TFX.

The story of Life is a long quiet river : A small town in the North of France. Doctor Mavial runs the local maternity ward. His mistress, head nurse Josette, has been waiting for years to be able to marry him. When the doctor’s wife dies, he takes away all hope from Josette, who immediately takes revenge by revealing that, twelve years earlier, in a fit of anger, she had switched two newborns. The families respectively victims of the exchange really have nothing in common: the Le Quesnoys lead a very respectable life as good bourgeois Catholics, while the Groseilles eke out a living in an HLM thanks to small schemes. This revelation will sow trouble…

Coming from the world of advertising (it is to him that we owe the cult ad for the insecticide Super Timor), the northerner Étienne Chatiliez launched into the deep end of cinema on February 3, 1988 with his first feature film, Life is a long quiet river.

Filmed in the Lille metropolitan area, notably its native town of Roubaix where the plot of the film takes place, the film retraces the lives of two completely opposite families: the petty bourgeois Le Quesnoy and the proletarian Groseille, who discover that one of their respective children was exchanged at birth… Behind the comedy of manners, Life is a long quiet river draws a satirical portrait of a popular France evolving at several speeds. The result was particularly grappling with France at the end of the 1980s, since the film was one of the biggest successes of the year 1988: exceeding four million admissions in theaters, it became a social phenomenon and still remains today one of the most popular comedies of its generation.

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Applause from the audience, Life is a long quiet river was also the case with critics and the world of cinema in general. Here is an extract from that published by Bertrand Mosca in First : “If you like Manichaeism, the contrasts between black and white, nice and bad, beautiful and ugly, you have to see the edifying spectacle of two very French families. At the Groseilles, we don’t care about anything and we let the children go about their business (sniffing glue in secret, farting on beer from the age of twelve…) while at the Le Quesnoys, we hustle, we put our hands on the table and above all we don’t forget that ‘Monday is ravioli!’ Life is a long quiet river could have been content to be an ironic and perverse film about the little things of two family lives, irresistibly caricatured, and therefore comical. But that was without taking into account the bad spirit of Etienne Chatillez for whom humor is not an end in itself. The laughter quickly becomes mocking, then grating and, on occasion, moving. A dose of life-saving laughter and a good mood.

A more than successful trial run on the part of Chatiliez, the film triumphed at the César ceremony: nominated seven times in total, the film left with four trophies: those for best first film, best screenplay, best female hopeful for Catherine Jacob and best actress in a supporting role for Hélène Vincent. But Life is a long quiet riverit is also a host of cult quotes and hilarious scenes carried by big names in French cinema (Hélène Vincent, André Wilms, Patrick Bouchitey) and by young children in great shape among whom we can discover a very young Benoît Magimel, as well as another future actor, Tara Römer, unfortunately died in 1999. Jesus, come back! from the Aubergé father to the raviolis of the Le Quesnoy family, Life is a long quiet river left some indelible traces in the collective memory.

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