TIFF's last installment from the French New Wave on the Essential 100. It has been described as the most original and complex film from that period so I was expecting good but not blown away. Took the doors right off. Nothing could have prepared me for Corinne Marchand. In 1962 she was 25 and was nothing less than Belmondo and Seberg in 'Breathless'. My notes "beauty in close up" and Varda a director I had never heard of, a shame on my soul. Varda is extraordinary, her trained eye as a photographer the gateway to her command of art. The French New Wave is something I can finally get my mind around beyond the moving experience and now explains why venue ranks so high in my own writing. Paris, specifically The Left Bank, is the true character and the alternating light and dark is startling in it's literalism as well as it's value as a symbol.
Without the wig Marchand reminded me of Kim Novak and the transformation is an important turning point. Music, painting and sculpture are the art forms in the background and in the subtext and while exposure to French language on a fairly regular and consistent basis yields it's own type of familiarity just short of literal understanding, the English subtitles while useful at points were also a distraction and nuisance. The movement and landscape were the images you would hope all film could be where the sound of a voice in any language was all you needed to know and to truly understand the story and appreciate the grandeur of the spectacle on the screen. For 89 minutes all that mattered was that I was here and forgiven for having taken so long to find 1962 through French eyes.
That the French had pulled out of Vietnam in 1957 and were on to the issue of Algeria and the student unrest in the streets pulled at me to remind once again that we as in North America are never first. We make more noise but even with history to guide us we often lack originality. Thank you TIFF.
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