French New Wave veteran Claude Chabrol is known for his thrillers, but not necessarily the edge-of-the-seat variety. The thrill here has to do with how Chabrol takes your breath away with his sumptuously-realized settings and complex relationships. Within this context he loves to expose and explore the ambiguities and indeed banality of evil, especially as it seeps through bourgeois veneer and often blurs the lines between good and bad guys. As soon as this film opens with a disclaimer about any resemblance to real events and persons you know immediately it will probably feature events ripped from French headlines. But knowledge of the corporate/political scandal on which the story is inspired is hardly necessary. Chabrol peels back the layers for us as we follow a French prosecutor investigating a high-powered international embezzling and kickback scheme. "The Piranha" is the nickname for Justice Jeanne Charmant-Killman (played with regal intensity by Isabelle Huppert).

In the same way that Chabrol's "thrill" is more subtle and shaded, so also the "comedy" of the title: the situations are farcical, but without necessarily making them laughing matters. Nearly every scene is driven by some underlying power struggle, with the players angling for position, negotiating, plea-bargaining or enjoying the vista from the dominant position just a little too much. Characters may be in control in one moment or setting and scrambling to get it in another. It's an open question whether Charmont-Killman, takes more pleasure from justice being done or in beating her opponents — and perhaps an open question whether or not Chabrol believes justice is any more than that anyway. Still, his sympathies seem to be on the side of good, even from just an aesthetic preference. The ghost of a more black and white morality haunts the cat and mouse games between his players in their morally gray world. So while the plot is thick here, the atmosphere much thicker, luxuriant, even decadent. The director plays the tensions like a maestro, so patiently, knowing just how hard to strike the key and how far to bend the note — "exquisite" is the adjective that comes to mind.  

We first meet a sampling of campers — 10-12 years old, middle-class white kids from Northern Illinois — in their individual homes and lives. My suspicion is that these directors spent a fair amount of time with these kids before following them to camp, because for the most part they ignore the camera and let us share the experience with them. Their experience at Swift Nature Camp in Wisconsin is classic: three weeks of sports, games, hikes, outdoor activities and crafts along with the usual bouts of homesickness, troublemaking, tentative exploration of that boy-girl thing and generally making the most of life as they approach the line between childhood's end and whatever is supposed to happen next.

This video documentary mostly just makes the viewer another camper — through fly-on-the-wall observation and occasional interviews with the kids. We do get some backstage whispers now and then as the young adult counselors express their frustrations and opinions of individual kids and, for example, the easy resort parents take to medicating their children these days. But mainly we're just plopped down in camp with the kids, wrapped up in the experience and made to remember what it was like to be a kid, among other kids, away from home. Simultaneously, you end up viewing these kids from the grownup perspective and reflecting on childhood in general, and life in a world that is exciting, scary, fun and often so very difficult to get through.

Kids say the darndest things, and there's plenty of that sort of pleasure here, but more importantly, Summercamp! reminds us just how deep and complex these little people are, how much is demanded of them so soon, and how many wonderful moments they seize upon that we miss, unless we get an opportunity like this to glimpse the world through their eyes.  

This "making of" documentary was filmed on location as the great Italian director Federico Fellini made his last film, The Voice of the Moon. But don't get your hopes up, Fellini fans. The central conceit involves "an American journalist" running around the set ostensibly doing a doing a story on the making of the film. Fellini plays along briefly, but really he just stays busy doing his job directing the film and so mostly what we get are shots of his back as he gives orders through his megaphone. The journalist, "Christina," manages to interview some extras and children, but she can't think up questions much deeper than "Aren't you proud to be working on a Fellini film?" (The answer: "Si".) There's plenty of behind-the-scenes chit-chat with the Fellini film stars Roberto Benigni and Paolo Vilaggio, but these are about what you'd expect off-the-cuff between takes — though Benigni is a compulsive ham (think Jerry Lewis on Letterman) and his schtick gets old quick. As a document of the making of Fellini's final movie, this film certainly belongs on the DVD of The Voice of the Moon. But it's the kind of Special Feature that will probably have you clicking back to the Main Menu in search of the Bloopers.