18 June 2021

Jacques Rozier's Du côté d'Orouët (1973)


If there are similarities beween this film and the Czech film Daisies (minus the political satire) and Rohmer's beach films (without the endless discussions), this film is out there on its own: a hymn to the craziness of youth, to forgetting about the cares of work in Paris, to being stupid for the sake of being stupid, and finding everything hilariously funny: they're in their late teens or early twenties, and they'll never be there again.

Yes, this is a film de vacances, but unlike, say, the early films of Patrice Leconte, where sexual frolics and innuendos were the order of the day. This is Joëlle (Danièle Croisy) going to Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie in La Vendée, escaping (she thinks) from the typing pool and its boss Gilbert (Bernard Ménoz) with her mates Kareen (Françoise Guégan) and Caroline (Caroline Cartier) to her grandmother's old house at the side of the sea, where she used to go as a young child.

Everything is wildly amusing: they wear chamberpots on their heads, they clomp about in grannie's old clogs, they howl and scream with laughter, they yell with horror at the live eels an old fisherman has given them, they discuss slimming and gorge themselves with chocolate. And then they bump into Gilbert, who knows that Joëlle is going there, and he's driven there with his tent, pitched at a campsite and – huge joke – he's no idea how to pronounce Orouët!

It might seem that the presence of Gilbert has put the damper on things, but not at all: he seeks shelter one stormy night when his tent can't take it anymore, and although they won't allow him to sleep in the house they allow him to pitch his tent in the sheltered side of the house: time to have fun and wake him up early in the morning with shouts and trumpet sounds. They can still have childish fun.

Anyone who finds this two-and-a-half-hour film long and tedious has never lived: the improvisation, as opposed to the elaborate planning and fascist control of the director, rules here. Rozier delights in the embarrassing silences, in what the actors do with them.

Sheer, unadulterated delight.

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