Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Zazie - a delightful, crazy, surreal adventure in Paris, 26 Nov 2005
A completely surreal and hillarious film by Louis Malle. Those who have read the original book will love the film adaptation. Zazie, a little French girl, visiting Paris and staying with her uncle (Ton-Ton) dreams of doing only one thing: Riding the Paris Metro. But as luck has it, the Metro is on strike and instead Zazie finds herself in the mad day and night life of 1960s Paris. She meets all sorts of crazy adults that go through adult problems, like bi-sexuality, love, loss of youth and beauty, even perversion and greed...all these characters she either loves, hates or simply drives them crazy in poignant way that only a child can get away with. Highly recommended!
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4.0 out of 5 stars
One of a kind, 20 April 2009
Every so often a film comes along which is so completely original, so utterly unlike anything you've seen before or you'll see since, that you can't really say whether it's good or bad, you can only be thankful that people can find the space to make such films. Of course you can say whether you like it or not, but this is entirely subjective, and the next person may well hate it. David Lynch's "Eraserhead" Eraserhead [DVD] [1976] is one such movie, "Zazie dans le Metro", Louis Malle's 3rd fill-length feature, is another. Odd though it may sound, these two can be mentioned in the same breath, because they both develop a unique style just for the one movie, they are both highly surreal, and both involve journeys.
But there the resemblance ends. "Zazie" is a self-consciously hilarious day in the life of Zazie visiting, and escaping from, her Uncle Gabriel, who may or may not be "homossessual", his wife Albertine, her would-be lover Trouscaillot, HIS would-be lover Madame Mouaque.... Get the picture? A 9-year-old child cast adrift in an adult world, coping with it by being in turns bored, resentful, amused, naughty, and very, VERY Rude. Although the film is called Zazie Dans Le Metro, there's a tube strike on, and Zazie only gets to ride the Metro when she's going home at the end of the film.
The book which the film is based on, by Raymond Queneau, is a kind of verbal firework, involving surreal puns and conceits. Queneau was Boris Vian's editor and shares his taste for satire and his sardonic view of the stupidity of adults, especially adults in love.
Malle has to find a visual equivalent of Queneau's style, which he does brilliantly by pastiching every other movie-maker around, from Buster Keaton onwards. Godard is in here, and Truffaut, and Chabrol and Resnais, and Hitchcock, and.... For a movie buff it's "spot the reference" heaven, but its fizz and amazing special effects carry the movie through on its own wave.
Performances are outstanding from Catherine Demongeot (no relation to Mylene, I think) as Zazie; her screen charm makes Amelie look like a grump, because it is based on an insistence on being treated as an equal and with a deep, deep and justified distrust of all adults. Phillipe Noiret makes pretty much his screen debut as Uncle Gabriel, having previously been a stand-up in cabaret. He is wonderfully funny, in a state of permanent outrage of a very prissy kind, but also capable of a profound melancholy, notably in a long monologue on the giddy heights of the Eiffel Tower. Vittorio Caprioli is outrageous as the love-sick gendarme - or inspector - or ticket collector. One of the running jokes is that characters keep turning up in different guises throughout the movie.
If I give "Zazie" 4 instead of 5, it is because I don't find it quite as hilarious as Zazie does, and as Malle intends it to be. I think this is because he lingers too much on Zazie laughing hysterically at her own jokes. I am English enough to resist this as Bad Form, and if someone nudges me to say how funny this is, I resist.
So it is enchanting and exhilarating - but not a constant bellyful of laughs.
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