La Belle Verte
La Belle Verte
| 18 September 1996 (USA)
La Belle Verte Trailers

As part of an intergalactic coalition, a well-meaning space alien volunteers to bring a message of self-actualization and harmony with nature to the one planet rejected by all her peers as incorrigible: Earth.

Reviews
siderite

The film starts with the tired idea of the noble savages: far away on their pristine planet, an agrarian society, that lives in harmony with itself and nature and has people with mental powers, decides it is time to send people on Earth, just because they haven't done it in 200 years. It's just that no one wants to go. Earth is stupid and ugly and corrupt. Yet, one of them wants to go, a woman who has heard her mother was actually from Earth. And she comes, teleported by the mental powers of her peers, only to scorn everything, from the polluted air to the dirty water, from the eating of meat to the concept of money. It goes like this until the very end, where the film just ends. What I found insulting is that, under the guise of well intended ignorance, the alien woman wreaks havoc with everything and everybody around her, from mental rapes to breaking technology, just because "it's bad for us". Yet she and her society prove again and again that they are very capable of doing the very things that they scorn at the beginning. Her sons soon join her, for the single reason of getting beautiful Earth girls. They quickly learn to drive a car and listen to music, then have fun making two football teams in a large match start dancing and kissing each other, or professional concert players do random interpretations of rock music. When they return, they take a rock CD, after explaining how great their "concerts of silence" are. I managed to see the film through just because I expected it to end with a great reveal, a satire of the satire, to prove that having double standards and being arrogant about your own culture to the point where you can just violate another was the whole joke. Alas, the film took itself seriously to the end. Imagine a vegetarian with the mental power to "disconnect" you, whenever you feel like eating pork. It's like that the entire movie.

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rgcustomer

Rather than comedy (it has few laughs) this film is more correctly labeled religious.The film is based on a sort of hippie perspective that all we need to do is throw away the efforts of the last few centuries and we'll just naturally be healthier, live longer, and even gain telepathy.It's of course fairy tale nonsense, and destructive to our future. Any human society living as depicted on the all-white-people planet would soon succumb to disease and population loss. It would be especially hard on women, who would have to have more children to offset the increased infant mortality. The rest of the universe doesn't care what you think. You're just food, or an obstacle.It's telling that the connection of one mind to another, to control its behavior is called "disconnection". This is the language of propaganda.In the end, I felt a little bit like I was seeing more Cirque du Soleil nonsense, but without the production values, where some idiot acting the fool claims to reveal deep truths about ourselves by jumping on things.

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FilmCriticLalitRao

La Belle verte is directed by Colline Serreau,a talented woman film maker from France who made us all laugh with joy with her 1985 film "Trois hommes et un couffin".Her film is probably the only French film of recent times that talks of nature,environment and importance of greenery in our daily existence.In La Belle verte,we see how an alien lady from a green planet descend on French capital Paris in order to gather information about the status of greenery. What follows is absolutely shocking for this alien person as she learns that earth's inhabitants have almost no respect for nature,greenery and environment. Apart from its pro nature stance,La Belle verte is also a searing attack on consumerist society where modern human beings have no idea of nature's power.This forces them to eat meat,listen to music which is nothing but cacophony.An important role in this film is played by Colline Serreau who is effective as Mila,lady from green planet.Thanks to a DVD box set of Colline Serreau's films,la Belle verte is enjoying renewed popularity as a film that has highlighted mother earth's plight.

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maxsimona

This movie is undiscovered or perhaps denied genius. Watch it, give yourself to it, you can't help both feel great and wonder what our society's up to these days, how really far behind we are, of our own selves, even. Fantastic idea from start to finish, (ET's, super-advanced humans have been keeping track of a number of civilizations, including ours, which has been the slowest to develop. They're surprised we still use money, and live less than a hundred years. What they note through this point of view will astonish you.) Well done, really well done, every detail well cured, and thoroughly thought out. Surprising, entertaining, intelligent movie. Visually and conceptually stimulating, a more mature movie than say, Rambo. But fit for kids, too.

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