I mainly watched this because I felt I had to, it being from the classic Godard period and everything, and was prepared to be hostile but wound up enjoying it more than I thought. It's very arty but the art has integrity and there is energy and talent - you can feel it's influence on 90s art house cinema.
The star is Jean-Pierre Leaud, best known for being Francois Truffaut's alter ego in many different movies. He plays a guy just out of the army who fancies himself as a bit of a Marxis; his best mate (Michel Debord) is a union activist; he tries to get on to a pretty girl (Chantal Goya) he meets at a cafe, who has two friends, one of whom (Marlene Jobert) seems to fall for Leaud.
This isn't very story heavy, to put it mildly. It's more notable for the stylistic devices: chapter headings, long scenes consisting of only a few takes where a guy asks a girl questions (I really loved these scenes they reminded me of talks I used to do when younger, firing off questions to women), Leaud talking to himself in a laundromat, spotting Brigitte Bardot in a cafe (she has this random cameo), the film in jokes (references in dialogue to Pierre Le Fot), going to see a porn film where there is artistic stuff, the depiction of Leaud's death via reportage, the combination of culture references (a doll is guillotined listening to a radio report of De Gaulle going Mitterand, talk of Satre, anti-Vietnam protests), the sound track.
I'm not super across what life was like for teens in 1965 Paris but a lot of it was recognisable: they talk pretentiously about politics, and also about sex; the guys want to get the girls into bed, the girls are curious. One of them (Goya) becomes a pop star, which is different (she becomes big in Japan which made me laugh).
The women are shown to be not that involved or interested in politics - dim pretty things. But the guys are pretentious idiots. Mind you they are more active and get more of the attention - this sort of misogyny is not un-familiar to French cinema from this period.
Jobert is very pretty - so too is Goya but Jobert has more life. I'm not sure what she sees in little Leaud, but I guess he is the director's surrogate. Jobert is Eva Green's mother in real life, which is pretty cool.
An energetic, lively movie. In an odd way I felt you could remake this for different generations and cultures.
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