Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4375 in VHS
• Released on: 1998-11-02
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Black & White, PAL, Subtitled
• Original language: French
• Number of tapes: 1
• Running time: 208 minutes

Synopsis
An exploration of the personal chaos in the lives of an intellectual and his two female friends, one his mistress who supports him, the other a promiscuous nurse. French dialogue.

Customer Reviews

Masterpiece
Long considered to be an idiosyncratic masterpiece by critics and film fans since its release in the early '70s this film is an exhausting experience. Leaud gives one of his best performances as the kind of character we would all like to be but can't - due to life's commitments. Leaud plays an out-of-work intellectual as only the French can produce. If you are a Francophile and in love with food, cigarettes, converation and love, then this is the film for you. Leaud dishes up plenty of conversation which helps to highlight the early 1970s malaise brought on by the passing of the optimism of the 1960s. The other two female leads give him more than a run for his money.

A Truly great film
I first saw this at the Playboy theatre in 1973 in Chicago. It amazes me that this film has been buried, nearly unheard of. It has the steady, patient gaze of pure cinema and makes me long for the days when films like this could capture the face of the visible world as it was and is lived. This is perhaps nostalgia, not for a lost reality, but I think it more precise to think it is an expressed regret that reality no longer matters to the culture: postmodern equivocation masks its diminutive status with contempt for noble gestures such as this three and a half hours black and white film devoted to the details that make up a life.

a unique, incredible cinematic experience
Eustache's depiction of bohemian dilettantism is rooted in the sixties, but has absorbed the lessons of Cassavetes and Warhol (real speech, duration, frustration), updating the New Wave for a darker, more cynical decade and, in the Leaud character's hapless mysoginistic sadism, even providing a sour foretaste of laddism. This is an acute and devastating critique - the romantic stereotype of the dandy/flaneur returned to the grubby, awkward ambiguity of Baudelaire's original vision of him - not just a wit and lover of the promenade, but a displaced and potentially corrupted/destructive force.