Words don't make sense
2019-10-17 03:16I love Louis Malle's Zazie dans le métro (1960) unreasonably, but it's an unreasonable movie, so that's all right.
It has a reasonable plot. Ten-year-old Zazie (Catherine Demongeot) is in Paris for the weekend, parked with her theatrical uncle Gabriel (Philippe Noiret) and his mannequin-beautiful partner Albertine (Carla Marlier) while her mother makes time with a new boyfriend; in fact most of the adults around her are consumed with their own affairs of the heart and/or loins, which Zazie regards with a gravely unimpressed eye; what she really wants to do is ride the Métro and there's a transit strike on. Under the crayon-red scrawl of the credits, the camera streams into the Gare de l'Est to the rail-rattle of trains and a sweet, whistled, melancholy theme. "Doukipudonktan!" exclaims Gabriel, standing in the platform crowd and discoursing to his handkerchief. No one in his colorful, disreputable circle is really set up for childcare and despite the best or worst interference of characters like the harried cabbie Charles (Antoine Roblot), the dreamy waitress Mado (Annie Fratellini), and a shape-shifting chancer who might or might not be named Pedro Surplus, Trouscaillon, or Aroun Arachide (Vittorio Caprioli), Zazie ricochets mostly unfettered around a city which to an inquisitive, imaginative kid is a carnival and a cinema and a jungle gym all rolled into one, with a little neon wildwood on the side. It could all be quite realist with its graffiti and its traffic jams and its landmarks cruised by coachfuls of tourists, except that the original 1959 novel by Raymond Queneau was written as a fractal middle finger to the Académie française and Malle takes the same reverential approach to the techniques of conventional cinema and therefore the weekend as it unfolds through the lens of skinny, red-sweatered, casually foul-mouthed Zazie is best classified as Nouvelle Batshit. The screenplay by Malle and Jean-Paul Rappeneau doesn't have a dramatic arc; it has gags, toppers, punch lines, non sequiturs, anti-jokes, towering set-ups, payoffs that won't quit, Gabriel lifting a grenadine-soaked manicure set from the shards of a table shattered like toast and mourning, "C'est foutu." The cinematography by Henri Raichi and the editing by Kenout Peltier is wall-to-wall with undercranking, jump-cuts, pixilation, random blasts of animation, and a cheerful disregard for the 180° rule. The soundtrack crunches itself up into chipmunk voices, runs backward, and every now and then comes utterly unstuck. It is pure live-action cartooning and the fact that it's taking place in such an unromanticized, recognizably location-shot Paris only makes it funnier when the honking congestion of gridlock buckles cars atop one another like pack ice or a neighborhood café renovates itself right out of existence. An ascent of the Eiffel Tower becomes a vertiginous exercise in lyrical absurdism, with Gabriel rhapsodizing to polar bears, weather balloons, and a Fresnel lens while Zazie and Charles argue all the way down an endless corkscrew of open-air stairs. National monuments are jumbled and dismissed: "The Panthéon, the Invalides, the Gendarmerie, the Madeleine—all a lot of hooey!" No one can mention Saint-Chapelle without referring to it as "a jewel of Gothic art." Even small cultural touchstones, like a plate of moules-frites, become opportunities for subversion when motored through by Zazie with such speed and panache that she all but assassinates her interlocutor with the splashed juice of carelessly flung shells while an awed audience gathers behind the restaurant's window. It's the kind of movie where a catalogue of favorite gags threatens to become a recapitulation of the movie, which is why I'm trying to limit myself. Albertine reminds Gabriel departing for work in the evening that he's forgotten his lipstick—he works as a drag queen, so of course we only ever see him as a plump and dapper young man in round glasses which give him more than a touch of Harold Lloyd—and a Technicolor blush out of nowhere reddens his cheek, as if Jack Cardiff had just zapped in from 1947 to light the scene. Zazie dressing by herself the next morning in their magnificent junk shop of an apartment puts on her shoes by the elegant expedient of throwing them into the air. A pair of glasses, four German tourists, and a piano all fall from the sky at suitable moments. The slow burn of a thwarted phone conversation climaxes when information is communicated and the phone explodes.
Above all, I love that Zazie herself is gloriously not the no-nonsense Alice around whom all the craziness pivots but a gap-toothed, tomboyish agent of chaos, like the natural child of Harpo Marx and Jacques Tati. Precocious as a real ten-year-old and not the Hollywood conception of one, she shocks the adults around her with frequent scoffs of "Mon cul!" and extricates herself from one unwanted guardian by casting him as a pervert in the eyes of passersby, but is puzzled to hear her uncle referred to as a "hormosessual" and drives another would-be babysitter literally screaming into the street by asking him sincerely about his "hang-ups." Out of the entire famous flea market at Les Puces, she's most interested in a pair of "blew-genes" to replace her grey schoolgirl skirt; she shrugs off her uncle's philosophy in favor of ice cream and sighs over the shambles of a nightclub that she partly helped set on fire, "At their age!" No one who has been paying attention to this movie and its open relationship to the fourth wall should be surprised at the point in the climactic brawl when the real-life film crew pitch in and start slugging people, but the icing is Zazie at the end of a long, exciting day, dozing through seltzer-and-sauerkraut-fueled fisticuffs worthy of the Keystone Kops and World War II. It's a child's-eye movie vibrating with all the weird energies of ridiculous, dangerous adulthood and only once does its pop-art phantasmagoria blur into a definite dream state—as all the characters converge on the cabaret "Le Paradis," Zazie rambling on foot through the nighttime neon shimmy of Pigalle falls briefly asleep on a car's hood and envisions the entire cast in a sequence of fast-motion tableaux—which is absolutely not the strangest thing in the film. Neither is the torch-juggling bear. I'm not sure if it's meant to be a person in a bear suit or an actual bear or if the distinction is meaningless, just as I know that "Pschitt" is the name of a perfectly real soda but also one of the attempted English translations of Jarry's iconic merdre and I think of both when I catch sight of the word emblazoned on a bus. The ironic photojournalist William Klein consulted on the art direction of Zazie and it's the sort of thing I wouldn't put past him or the film in general. Everything can be something else and usually is, or at least if you give it a minute it'll get that way. We never get to see Gabriel's legendary Spanish ballerina act, but we do witness the transformation of the ethereal Albertine into the equally masklike, motorcycle-butch Albert. Asked what she did with her two days in Paris, Zazie delivers the pungent, poignant moral, "I got older."
Standing on top of an elevator as it bears him into the catwalk heights of the Eiffel Tower, Gabriel muses, "All Paris is a dream, Zazie is a reverie, and all this is a reverie within a dream . . ." Zazie dans le métro is not a very dreamlike film for all that; it's too joyously artificial, crowded in every frame with marginalia of nonsensical advertisements, air violins, or unnoticed crime. Zazie anchors it all, stubbornly her own girl in the face of coy, sententious, infuriating adults and dreaming of the day when she can be a teacher just to "drive those brats nuts." Until I read more than the first page of Queneau, I suspect this movie will go on reminding me of the fiction of Angela Carter, especially her knack for holding the intellectual and the sexual in disturbing, funny balance and her freewheeling style that slips any definition of register just as Zazie eludes authority over and over again until it is childhood that catches up with her instead. Early in the film, her salty deployment of profanity causes a taxi meter to roll over in shock and her uncle to fend off a curbside of scandalized pedestrians with the resigned in-joke, "What do you want? It's the New Wave." You can't say you weren't warned. But even if you were, I don't think it should deter you from spending an hour and a half of a weekend in a Paris of pure cinema. This cornucopia brought to you by my mercurial backers at Patreon.
It has a reasonable plot. Ten-year-old Zazie (Catherine Demongeot) is in Paris for the weekend, parked with her theatrical uncle Gabriel (Philippe Noiret) and his mannequin-beautiful partner Albertine (Carla Marlier) while her mother makes time with a new boyfriend; in fact most of the adults around her are consumed with their own affairs of the heart and/or loins, which Zazie regards with a gravely unimpressed eye; what she really wants to do is ride the Métro and there's a transit strike on. Under the crayon-red scrawl of the credits, the camera streams into the Gare de l'Est to the rail-rattle of trains and a sweet, whistled, melancholy theme. "Doukipudonktan!" exclaims Gabriel, standing in the platform crowd and discoursing to his handkerchief. No one in his colorful, disreputable circle is really set up for childcare and despite the best or worst interference of characters like the harried cabbie Charles (Antoine Roblot), the dreamy waitress Mado (Annie Fratellini), and a shape-shifting chancer who might or might not be named Pedro Surplus, Trouscaillon, or Aroun Arachide (Vittorio Caprioli), Zazie ricochets mostly unfettered around a city which to an inquisitive, imaginative kid is a carnival and a cinema and a jungle gym all rolled into one, with a little neon wildwood on the side. It could all be quite realist with its graffiti and its traffic jams and its landmarks cruised by coachfuls of tourists, except that the original 1959 novel by Raymond Queneau was written as a fractal middle finger to the Académie française and Malle takes the same reverential approach to the techniques of conventional cinema and therefore the weekend as it unfolds through the lens of skinny, red-sweatered, casually foul-mouthed Zazie is best classified as Nouvelle Batshit. The screenplay by Malle and Jean-Paul Rappeneau doesn't have a dramatic arc; it has gags, toppers, punch lines, non sequiturs, anti-jokes, towering set-ups, payoffs that won't quit, Gabriel lifting a grenadine-soaked manicure set from the shards of a table shattered like toast and mourning, "C'est foutu." The cinematography by Henri Raichi and the editing by Kenout Peltier is wall-to-wall with undercranking, jump-cuts, pixilation, random blasts of animation, and a cheerful disregard for the 180° rule. The soundtrack crunches itself up into chipmunk voices, runs backward, and every now and then comes utterly unstuck. It is pure live-action cartooning and the fact that it's taking place in such an unromanticized, recognizably location-shot Paris only makes it funnier when the honking congestion of gridlock buckles cars atop one another like pack ice or a neighborhood café renovates itself right out of existence. An ascent of the Eiffel Tower becomes a vertiginous exercise in lyrical absurdism, with Gabriel rhapsodizing to polar bears, weather balloons, and a Fresnel lens while Zazie and Charles argue all the way down an endless corkscrew of open-air stairs. National monuments are jumbled and dismissed: "The Panthéon, the Invalides, the Gendarmerie, the Madeleine—all a lot of hooey!" No one can mention Saint-Chapelle without referring to it as "a jewel of Gothic art." Even small cultural touchstones, like a plate of moules-frites, become opportunities for subversion when motored through by Zazie with such speed and panache that she all but assassinates her interlocutor with the splashed juice of carelessly flung shells while an awed audience gathers behind the restaurant's window. It's the kind of movie where a catalogue of favorite gags threatens to become a recapitulation of the movie, which is why I'm trying to limit myself. Albertine reminds Gabriel departing for work in the evening that he's forgotten his lipstick—he works as a drag queen, so of course we only ever see him as a plump and dapper young man in round glasses which give him more than a touch of Harold Lloyd—and a Technicolor blush out of nowhere reddens his cheek, as if Jack Cardiff had just zapped in from 1947 to light the scene. Zazie dressing by herself the next morning in their magnificent junk shop of an apartment puts on her shoes by the elegant expedient of throwing them into the air. A pair of glasses, four German tourists, and a piano all fall from the sky at suitable moments. The slow burn of a thwarted phone conversation climaxes when information is communicated and the phone explodes.
Above all, I love that Zazie herself is gloriously not the no-nonsense Alice around whom all the craziness pivots but a gap-toothed, tomboyish agent of chaos, like the natural child of Harpo Marx and Jacques Tati. Precocious as a real ten-year-old and not the Hollywood conception of one, she shocks the adults around her with frequent scoffs of "Mon cul!" and extricates herself from one unwanted guardian by casting him as a pervert in the eyes of passersby, but is puzzled to hear her uncle referred to as a "hormosessual" and drives another would-be babysitter literally screaming into the street by asking him sincerely about his "hang-ups." Out of the entire famous flea market at Les Puces, she's most interested in a pair of "blew-genes" to replace her grey schoolgirl skirt; she shrugs off her uncle's philosophy in favor of ice cream and sighs over the shambles of a nightclub that she partly helped set on fire, "At their age!" No one who has been paying attention to this movie and its open relationship to the fourth wall should be surprised at the point in the climactic brawl when the real-life film crew pitch in and start slugging people, but the icing is Zazie at the end of a long, exciting day, dozing through seltzer-and-sauerkraut-fueled fisticuffs worthy of the Keystone Kops and World War II. It's a child's-eye movie vibrating with all the weird energies of ridiculous, dangerous adulthood and only once does its pop-art phantasmagoria blur into a definite dream state—as all the characters converge on the cabaret "Le Paradis," Zazie rambling on foot through the nighttime neon shimmy of Pigalle falls briefly asleep on a car's hood and envisions the entire cast in a sequence of fast-motion tableaux—which is absolutely not the strangest thing in the film. Neither is the torch-juggling bear. I'm not sure if it's meant to be a person in a bear suit or an actual bear or if the distinction is meaningless, just as I know that "Pschitt" is the name of a perfectly real soda but also one of the attempted English translations of Jarry's iconic merdre and I think of both when I catch sight of the word emblazoned on a bus. The ironic photojournalist William Klein consulted on the art direction of Zazie and it's the sort of thing I wouldn't put past him or the film in general. Everything can be something else and usually is, or at least if you give it a minute it'll get that way. We never get to see Gabriel's legendary Spanish ballerina act, but we do witness the transformation of the ethereal Albertine into the equally masklike, motorcycle-butch Albert. Asked what she did with her two days in Paris, Zazie delivers the pungent, poignant moral, "I got older."
Standing on top of an elevator as it bears him into the catwalk heights of the Eiffel Tower, Gabriel muses, "All Paris is a dream, Zazie is a reverie, and all this is a reverie within a dream . . ." Zazie dans le métro is not a very dreamlike film for all that; it's too joyously artificial, crowded in every frame with marginalia of nonsensical advertisements, air violins, or unnoticed crime. Zazie anchors it all, stubbornly her own girl in the face of coy, sententious, infuriating adults and dreaming of the day when she can be a teacher just to "drive those brats nuts." Until I read more than the first page of Queneau, I suspect this movie will go on reminding me of the fiction of Angela Carter, especially her knack for holding the intellectual and the sexual in disturbing, funny balance and her freewheeling style that slips any definition of register just as Zazie eludes authority over and over again until it is childhood that catches up with her instead. Early in the film, her salty deployment of profanity causes a taxi meter to roll over in shock and her uncle to fend off a curbside of scandalized pedestrians with the resigned in-joke, "What do you want? It's the New Wave." You can't say you weren't warned. But even if you were, I don't think it should deter you from spending an hour and a half of a weekend in a Paris of pure cinema. This cornucopia brought to you by my mercurial backers at Patreon.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}