June 2: Zazie dans le Métro

Thursday, June 2 2022 8PM | Zazie dans le Métro France 1960 d. Louis Malle with Catherine Demongeot, Philippe Noiret, Hubert Deschamps, Carla Marlier, Annie Fratellini, Vittorio Caprioli, Jacques Dufilho, Yvonne Clech, Odette Piquet and Nicolas Bataille. Colour. 89 m

“How do you adapt a book that invents words, defies syntax and spelling, and irreverently mixes street slang, profanities, and philosophy? Indeed, this proved a challenge, and while the twenty-seven-year-old Malle rose to it with astonishing inventiveness, when the film came out in November 1960, it mystified critics and audiences alike and did considerably less well at the box office than his previous two works, Elevator to the Gallows and The Lovers (both 1958). Even though its madcap humor and creative cinematography gained it a cult following (a Paris cinema showed it one day a week for more than twenty years), even though Queneau declared himself ‘enchanted’ and Charlie Chaplin was ‘impressed,’ Zazie dans le Métro was seen as a curiosity or, at best, a stylistic exercise. Yet to watch it today is to rediscover a gem—not just a technically advanced film, though it is that, but also a seminal one about Paris and a prescient account of a modern girl on the brink.” Ginette Vincendeau

“…the jovial experimental oddity Zazie dans le métro [is] a sizzling snapshot of France in a new age of accelerated modernity, and a prescient look at an emerging young generation.” Elena Lazic

Links: IMDB Wikipedia

See Also: Les Quatre-Cent Coups (Truffaut 1959), Le souffle au cœur aka Murmur of the Heart (Malle, 1971), Pretty Baby (Malle, 1978)

Series: Spring 2022 :: Louis Malle