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The titular divide is one of many, socialism and consumerism, documentary and artifice, tracking shot and jump cut, so close and so far apart. "L'époque de James Bond et de Vietnam," a calm eye on youthful turbulence. Boys talk revolution and cop a feel at the Parisian coffeehouse, the main specimen is the callow pollster and slogan-dispenser who can't quite get Belmondo's cigarette trick right, the archetypal Jean-Pierre Léaud juvenile. Opposite his intellectualized anguish lies the enviable vacancy of the aspiring yé-yé songbird (Chantal Goya), for whom brushing hair in front of a mirror is a full-time job. "A kind of movement of perpetual rebellion," a generation's excitement and tedium caught in Jean-Luc Godard's gray amber, a perfect expression of the time and place. Chansons and interrogations, intertitles and gunshots. Separate stories at adjacent bistro tables (cf. Losey's The Servant), one is a conjugal drama with pistol in purse. Activist monkeyshines, graffiti on the U.S. ambassador's limo, the new pop dogma. "Give us a TV set and a car but deliver us from liberty." Bowling arcade to soda stand to photo kiosk to recording booth and back, one unbroken take, the capper is a hothead with a knife sticking out of his chest. Interview with Miss 19, notes for the projectionist. "Who are you, Mister Bob Dylan?" Amiri Baraka recap on the elevated train, Ingmar Bergman pastiche in the theater, Brigitte Bardot as Brigitte Bardot. Le Figaro comes in handy when toilet paper runs out, "La Marseillaise" finds its miniature guillotine. Barbed, plaintive, poignantly attuned to the romantic behind the analytical. "Can it, Trotskyite!" A typed death report and the heroine pregnant and adrift at the close, "comprenne qui voudra." Eustache in The Mother and the Whore surveys the aftermath. Cinematography by Willy Kurant. With Marlène Jobert, Catherine-Isabelle Duport, Eva-Britt Strandberg, and Birger Malmsten. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |