I can't help feeling that some of the people who've commented on this are asking this director to be something he's not - he is, by the way, Georgian, not French, although his last few films were made in France. He does tend to meander and more or less hit upon an idea and let it lead him where it will which may be hard to take for those - myself included - who are more at home with a well-made script that boasts a beginning, a middle and an end. But he also has charm, a commodity in short supply these days and practically non-existent in Hollywood. In some ways our protagonist is directly related to Preston Sturges' Sullivan except that Sullivan was an affluent movie director who went slumming and OUR hero is a working stiff with a dream. In both cases they wound up back at home like Dorothy and Toto but no one can take the JOURNEY away from them and that's what it's all about.

This is a funny, quirky comedy. It is a meditation on work, its rewards and frustrations. A welder in a large, repellent factory gives in to his original ambition of being a painter, and takes off for Venice.

There's a lot of oddball behavior. The story is not terrifically linear, and it's not clear what the main character has learned at the end of his voyage. But you do get to spend time with some charming eccentrics in offbeat situations. And afterward you can puzzle out exactly why the characters behaved the way they did.

It's abominable that this film was never seen in the US. Too many good international movies simply don't make it to our side of the ocean. We can hope that the medium of DVD will improve matters, but this little gem of a picture for one fell right through the cracks.

This film is such a rare mixture of place, character and time that one element seems never to upstage the other. The blend is unique and evolves into an organic presentation where each is essentially dependent upon the other. For example,scenes are so impeccably designed that a scene itself becomes a character in time. The blue car, the mud shoes, the factory, the bikes, the flowers, and so on all fit into a carefully crafted philosophical whole which defines temporal existence. This is true of other like scenes, such as the city of Venice or living conditions of the transvestite hatcheck person with the two pet Norway rats. The characters fit perfectly into each scene in the same way that the subjects of Norman Rockwell fit into his paintings. Time becomes the cultural lag which slows down everything, from the chemical factory workers to the boatmen in Venice. Even the most absurd scenes flow into a gentle homogenaity. "Where did you get the crocodile?" Vincent asks his young son as if he were inquiring about an ice cream cone. In the final analysis, Monday Morning is the nonviolent triumph of humanity over contemporary absurdity.