Monday Morning

Andrei Tarkovsky used to name Otar Iosseliani as one of his favourite film-makers, but the Georgian director had a back-handed way of returning the compliment. He said of Russian cinema's number one metaphysician, "It is somewhat ill-bred to be always emphasising how religious you are – like boasting that your father is a marquis." The dandyish turn of this phrase (who knows whether he originally said it in Russian, Georgian or French, the language of his adopted home?) says a lot about Iosseliani's own quasi-aristocratic style. In his last two films, in fact, he has himself played dapper, disreputable aristos. In the sublimely rambling Farewell, Home Sweet Home, he was a boozy French toff; in Monday Morning, he's a marquis, the Marchese Enzo di Martino, a bumbling Peter Sellers-ish fop in a vast brocade coat, living on his uppers in a mouldy Venetian palazzo, but determined to make the finest impression. In a kind of cinematic droit de seigneur, Iosseliani gives himself the film's one unequivocal gag, a fastidious set-up resulting in a grandly throwaway flourish.

It's the only laugh-out-loud moment in a film specialising in an almost subliminal humour – Monday Morning is permeated with comic spirit, yet its jokes languorously refuse to rise to the surface. Iosseliani's idea of a good joke is one that stretches out to two hours, keeping you scratching your head. The whole film seems like one long, complex build-up to a punchline that never comes: Iosseliani is a master of the cinematic shaggy-dog story, all the while drawing you into his dream-like, absurd world with perfect elegance.

Loosely speaking, Monday Morning is a critique of the working week. Vincent (played by Jacques Bidou, a man with a chubby, disconsolate face like Benny Hill after a lost weekend) is a factory worker and Sunday painter who struggles out of bed every morning, takes a train and a bus to work, then enters the factory gates with the same crowd of men all getting the last puff from their fag before they pass the "No Smoking" sign on their way in. "Défense de Fumer" here has something of the ring of "Abandon All Hope''. Vincent is a welder, but quite what goes on in the factory is hard to fathom. Coloured liquids spout out of pipes, geysers erupt from mounds of earth, people wheel toilets by on trolleys, and dense smoke billows out to a chorus of incomprehensible Tannoy announcements.

Then we lose Vincent from view and get caught up in life in his rural community, where everyone looks like a walking cartoon. There's a skinny postman who steams open letters (when he's not out collecting snakes in a jar) and a vast man in a wheelchair, fag forever rammed in his mouth. There's a grouchy bald neighbour and his impressively big-haired wife. And there's Vincent's family, including his larky Alfa-Romeo-driving old mother, and his teenage son, who is painting a frieze of George and the Dragon in the church tended by a voyeuristic, abseiling priest. Oh and look, the gypsies just rolled into town, and two girls have crept into the garden and deposited a crocodile in the bushes. This is where you sit up with a start. Iosseliani's low-dialogue, high-imagery films have a way of drifting from moment to moment, one damn thing after another in a seemingly unconnected linear chain. And then he'll quietly throw you a whammy of surpassing strangeness. Here it's the crocodile; in Farewell... it was the moment when a marabou stork strutted into a swanky society function and flew onto the hostess's shoulder.

Vincent, meanwhile, has drifted off to Venice: he pals up with a boatman who shows him, in a moment of surpassing grace, a rooftop view of the city. Then he wonders what to do next. The visit doesn't do much for Vincent's frustrated artistic capabilities – his paintings are such banal Montmartre-tourist daubs that you wonder why he bothered. But he does get the chance for a quiet smoke, the odd glass and a bit of a sing-song: this is an old-fashioned bon viveur's film in which the woes of the world are assuaged by a night on the tiles and, ideally, a spot of larking around with ladders. It's the sort of idyll in which a character can knock on a wall and someone will reach through and hand them a bottle, no questions asked.

No questions asked, indeed: this is a dream film, in which nothing seems to have cause or consequence. Vincent leaves home, but no one seems too angry when he returns; he has his pocket picked, but doesn't seem to mind. He meets a woman in black and carries her luggage across Venice, but their paths never cross again (although she does drift enigmatically by in a boat, fag in mouth like everyone else). The only strand that does tie up, oddly enough, is that the crocodile ends up being surprisingly useful. With the same logic as the narrative, music drifts in and out, as if from a radio on the blink. Sometimes the dialogue is audible, sometimes a blur. The term "never a dull moment" somehow comes to mind.

If Iosseliani resembles anyone stylistically, it's Jacques Tati – although if Robert Bresson had ever tried his hand at screwball comedy, it might have turned out like this. Ultimately, though, he's totally distinctive. There's a matter-of-factness about the set-ups and the altogether naturalistic, even drab way in which it's all shot by William Lubtchansky that heightens the absurdity. Sometimes resembling a series of poised revue sketches, the film feels like a slyly calculated live-action cartoon.

In one way, the film seems oddly anachronistic – a spirit-of-'68 jibe at the daily grind, in which middle-aged men drift around in amiable drop-out fashion while women raise their eyebrows disapprovingly and carry the can. But Iosseliani finally sees the world with a shrug of fatalism – you know that the nine-to-five isn't going to go away, and that the reverie is ultimately a brief holiday in beautiful scenery. After a fabulously euphoric moment, the film brings us down to earth with a bump in its closing shots.

The whole thing is done almost entirely in images, too, with the bare minimum of dialogue; in the process, Iosseliani reinvents the shape of society in his own whimsical, but philosophical image. He's been making films since the Sixties, and remains among the last long-term nonconformist directors to be widely discovered (his last film released here was 1984's Favourites of the Moon, a rambling tale of umpteen characters and a load of Sèvres porcelain). Monday Morning is a good time to discover a cranky old master, who gets testier all the time, in his own jovially enigmatic way.

j.romney@independent.co.uk