One Word Movie

Bande à part

As I found out when I tried to watch L'appartment, nothing dates faster than sophistication. By contrast, Bande à part, a new wave classic from 1964, still feels modern. Some of the sequences are pure cinema, but there are stretches where you wonder what in the name of hell is going on. A character is shown crossing a river using a tethered rowing-boat, and then later in the film you get exactly the same thing. There are endless shots of the two men doughnutting their car, and a bit where a tiger makes an inexplicable appearance. Sometimes when I was watching this I was rapt, and then at other times I was looking at my watch.

Similarly, it was hard to say whether this should get a good or shit rating. It's a complex and engaging in the same way as a novel, and it's much harder to have knee-jerk reactions about those unless they have too many adjectives or an insufficent semi-colon density.

Anyway, I saw it a couple of days ago and I've been thinking about it quite a lot since, so it definitely falls into the good category. Unlike Deja Vu, for instance, which evaporated like a fart in a high breeze.

posted by Chairman Peyote @ 12:45 PM