The Varnished Culture's Thumbnail Reviews
Regularly added bite-sized reviews about Literature, Art, Music & Film.
Voltaire said the secret of being boring is to say everything.
We do not wish to say everything or see everything; life, though long is too short for that.
We hope you take these little syntheses in the spirit of shared enthusiasm.
Ship of Fools
(By Tucker Carlson) (2018)
The brilliant TV pundit Carlson (one of the few Americans in the public square who understand irony) is perhaps better on screen than in print. Still, this is an amusing, engaging, stimulating and un-footnoted overview of America’s political and corporate elites, and how they, like the Emperor with no clothes, disport their naked ambition with a staggering immunity from introspection. Carlson is a rock-solid conservative, and has plenty to say about American liberal idiocy and childishness, but that doesn’t mean he can’t or won’t train a metaphorical AR-15 on the Republican Party as well. In fact, his thesis (a fortiori 3 years after the book came out) is that there is a rift in America, not along party or factional lines, but “between those who benefit from the status quo, and those who don’t.” In other words, a dangerous state of affairs, a class system (the very concept is uncomfortable to Yanks) as “institutionally torpid, economically immobile, culturally atrophied and socially stratified“* as the Ancien Régime in 1789 France.
Written in the breezy and familiar American style, the author gives us a fact and opinion overload (again, we say, sans footnotes), making clear that whilst he’s no Trump fan, the forces that produced him, did him down and now replace him, are far less palatable. In 2021, the U.S. is in crisis: entropic decline of its international stature, sagging under the weight of public debt so terrible that no-one mentions it, growing class divisions fomented by a insouciant and ignorant cabal of the nouveau riche, cities on fire, race-baiting, flourishing inflation, gashed and breached national borders (physical and digital), contempt for traditional values and authority, a vibrant cradle of lies in the public square, a pliable and narcoleptic Fourth Estate (and President), an Orwellian suppression of dangerous ideas via monopolistic social platforms and mob rule. Amid this catastrophic environment, President Biden‘s carers act like Emperor Nero. And the Republicans seem to sulk and wait for Joe and Kamala to self-immolate.
Plenty of people hate Carlson but everyone needs to hear what he has to say, because a lot of it makes sense and sense is valuable even when it bruises. In what Democrats celebrate as America’s ‘diversity,’ in cities throughout the country nervously marketed by real estate agents as ‘vibrant,’ Carlson asks why a country with no shared language, ethnicity, religion, culture, or history would remain a country. Here are some sample quotes from Ship of Fools on the various issues arising from that premise:
“Trump’s election wasn’t about Trump. It was a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class…
“Free speech is the enemy of authoritarian rule…That’s also why our ruling class seeks to crush it.”
“The meritocracy, it turns out, creates its own kind of stratification, a kind more rigid than the aristocracy it replaced…In Chelsea Clinton’s world, nobody tells her she’s wrong…The best thing about old-fashioned liberals was how guilty they were. They felt bad about everything, and that kept them empathetic and humane. It also made them instinctively suspicious of power, which was useful. Somebody needs to be.”
[For the elites, illegal immigration is] the perfect arrangement. You get to feel virtuous for having a housekeeper; she walks the dog while you’re at SoulCycle. You can see why affluent moms tended to hate Donald Trump and his talk of building a wall. For Americans in the top 20 percent of income distribution, mass immigration is one of the best things that ever happened – cheap help, obedient employees, more interesting restaurants, and all without guilt. There’s no downside, at least none that you personally experience. You don’t take the bus or use the emergency room for health care or send your kids to overpopulated public schools that have canceled gym and music to pay for ESL because half the kids can’t speak English.”“Elites choose to live in cocoons white enough to burn your retinas…Meanwhile, the identity politics they espouse makes the country easier to govern, even as it makes it much harder to live in.”
“[When Edward] Kennedy…an absolutist on legal abortion…died in 2009, feminists celebrated his life. The Huffington Post ran a piece asking, ‘What would Mary Jo Kopechne have thought of Ted’s career?” Its conclusion: “Maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” Mary Jo Kopechne had become an abortion martyr.”
“It is possible to isolate the precise moment that Trump permanently alienated the Republican establishment in Washington: February 13, 2016. There was a GOP primary debate that night in Greenville, South Carolina, so every Republican in Washington was watching. Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump articulated something that no party leader had said out loud. “We should never have been in Iraq,” Trump announced, his voice rising. “We have destabilized the Middle East.” Many in the crowd booed, but Trump kept going: “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”
“Politically, the decision to become a prowar party paid huge dividends for Democrats. From 1968 through 1988, Democrats decisively lost five presidential elections and narrowly won another. Since Clinton took the party back in a hawkish direction, the Democrats have lost the popular vote only once, in 2004…With both parties aligned on the wisdom of frequent military intervention abroad…America has remained in a state of almost permanent war…Less than a year into his first term, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, apparently for the transcendent achievement of not being George W. Bush. But the prize had no lasting effect on Obama.”
“No matter how often they’re [the foreign policy establishment] wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it. They certainly never blame themselves.”
“The core belief in transgenderism is that biology isn’t real: sex is not determined at the DNA level; it’s determined by appearance…It’s a measure of how bovine our ruling class has become that educated people fall for nonsense like this especially hard. Employees of Facebook came up with more than seventy gender choices for their site. The choices include asexual, gender neutral, polygender, agender, bigender, gender fluid, gender variant, neutrois, pangender, transmasculine, as well as something called two-spirit…There’s not a person on earth who could define all of these categories. Some of them don’t really have definitions. It doesn’t matter. Their legitimacy is defended with determined ruthlessness by the arbiters of gender politics…the small group of unhappy people in charge…”
“With every passing year, the goals of the environmental movement became steadily more abstract…Environmentalism as a religion is more compelling than environmentalism as a means to save birds or clean up some river in Maine…Few preachers live up to the standards they set from the pulpit, and [Leonardo] Di Caprio is no exception. In the summer of 2016, Di Caprio was scheduled to receive an [environmental] award…He was in Cannes attending the film festival at the time, so he chartered a private jet to fly from France to New York and back…Billionaire investor Richard Branson tells audiences not to “be the generation responsible for irreversibly damaging the environment” with carbon. To spread that message, he travels on his own Dassault Falcon 50EX…Caring deeply is the only measure that matters. That’s why their consciences remain untroubled, no matter how many times they violate the standards they demand of others. Once you understand this, the Paris climate accord makes sense. An international agreement designed to curb carbon emissions, negotiated next to Europe’s busiest private airport. Nobody in attendance flew commercial. Nobody seemed to feel bad about it, either.”
“You can’t enforce enlightenment by fiat.”
Stowaway
(Directed by Joe Penna) (2021)
Commander Marina Barnett (Toni Collette), scientist David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim) and medico Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick) set off on a two-year mission to Mars, unaware until they are past the point of no return, that they are carrying a stowaway [Shades of Dr. Zachary Smith! Oh, the pain of it all – Ed.].
The stowaway, an engineer, Michael Adams (Shamier Anderson), somehow got himself accidentally hidden behind a panel, and just wasn’t noticed during takeoff. He has unwittingly damaged a device necessary for production of breathable air.
“Need Another Seven [Four] Astronauts?”
Putting aside these ludicrous aspects, Stowaway is a mixed bag. Despite the small world and the four characters, it is not claustrophobic; there is a nice quietness during the moments when the overly-dramatic music is not cranked up to 11. The space-walking scenes are too long for suspense, and owe a lot to Gravity and Tron 2. Toni Collette has an easy authority as the commander, although it is unlikely that she would be the only crew-member able to land the ship (an important plot point). Anna Kendrick is fine, and not at all annoying. The moral dilemma, when it comes, is over with in moments.
Reviews of Stowaway have complained that it is a clichéd ‘unexpected participant in a remote expedition‘ film. Unfortunately it is not. The Thing or Alien it is not. More’s the pity.
Mare of Easttown (Foxtel)
(Directed by Craig Zobel) (HBO; Foxtel, 2021)
There are more sombre crime series on streaming services than a world-weary detective can poke a blood-stained stick at. How then to choose which to watch – and why watch at all? Pull up a rumpled armchair, push away the AA booklets; give this one a go.
Mare of Easttown, a Foxtel series written by Brad Ingelsby, has held our grumpy, misanthropic attention for four of its seven episodes. Mary-Something ‘Mare’ Sheehan (Kate Winslet,) an unsmiling Philadelphia small-town detective, tramps along, bottom lip dragging on the muddy ground, six-inch-long dark roots (seriously?) pulled back off her make-up-free lemon (sorry, face). The town is redneck, poor, cold, wet and full of weirdos. Mare is dogged by a personal tragedy, of course. She is in a personal legal fight, of course. She can’t stop vaping, of course. An out of town detective, a young and perky guy (Evan Peters, excellent but miscast) is assigned to follow Mare round, of course. You get the picture.
But we watch because Winslet is affecting and we feel that the story is going somewhere. The fear is that finally it will disappear up its own clichés of predictability or that it will blow up in a shower of fireworks and unlikely reveals, (which would be worse).
But in the meantime, Winslet is naturally engaging. Guy Pearce (as an unlikely love interest) smiles a lot and we wonder if he is untrustworthy or merely smug. Angourie Rice (Mare’s daughter Siobhan) overacts. She will soon rival Toni Collette in Hereditary or Rene Zellweger in….well, everything…for twitching as a method of demonstrating deep felt emotion. She also, unfortunately, features in two scenes meant to leaven the misery – a tooth-achingly sweet teenage pickup and a parachuted-in slapstick scene.
Julianne Nicholson as Mare’s friend, Lori; Cailee Spaeny as the hopeless single mother Erin; Jean Smart as Helen, Mare’s caustic mother and Jack Mulhern as Dylan, convey just the right levels of repressed anger and disappointment. Otherwise the be-bearded and be-anoraked men can be difficult to distinguish. The real stand-out in the cast though, is Mackenzie Lansing as Brianna Delrasso, Dylan’s fabulously nasty girlfriend. So limited that she’s even resentful of poor Erin, Dylan’s ex. The malice oozes out of the screen.
Perhaps the story will be predictable (did we mention the possible child-molester priest? Did we say that Mare was once the town’s sporting sweetheart?), but it’s the ride.
It’s like ‘Peyton Place’ for the lower classes [Ed.]
Hamilton – The Musical
(Directed by Amy Campbell, Lyric Theatre, Sydney, 2021) (Reviewed by Margo Jakobsen)
Masked-up and entering the Sydney Lyric Theatre in an orderly fashion, I was eager to see if the musical justified the buzz. Some already knew, a couple of fans wearing period costumes of their own. Others were clearly familiar with the moments. For example, a cry went up at the ‘immigrants get the job done’ line and Brent Hill’s crassly, juvenile King George, made a popular and delicious contrast with the rawest emotions of Chloe Zuel as Hamilton’s wife, Eliza. The play ended with her enigmatic gasp.
Amazing songs, such as Hamilton‘s opener and the classic, ‘my shot’ song. Throughout, the wordy, clever rap was crystal clear, tight, fast and eminently suited to packing in the dense detail of this American, colonial story without losing us along the way. I’d strongly recommend familiarising yourself before the show, with a basic outline of the events and main political players around the time when the national government starts. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s much-awarded achievement in writing the music, book and lyrics and also playing the role of Alexander Hamilton on Broadway has given him a stratospheric, global reputation. The choreography was energetic, disciplined and expressive while the revolving stage added a fluidity to the dramatic transitions. Some have criticized the set as ‘drab’, but I think it was traditionally and effectively used, and kept the focus on the characters and action. Full-marks to the Australian cast. First and foremost, Jason Arrow as Hamilton and Lyndon Watts as his friend, Aaron Burr, a relationship that disintegrated into jealousy and a duel. There was not one weak performance. They all deserved the sustained, standing ovation.
Masked-up at the Lyric Theatre, Sydney. Photo by M. Jakobsen.
Hot Air
(Directed by Frank Coraci) (2019)
Steve Coogan revels in his image as a hard-edged playboy. But he also want us to think that there’s a soulful, sentimental man in there somewhere. The footloose, cynical womanising Steve Coogan character in the ‘tour’ movies with Rob Brydon is leavened with wistful moments of loneliness. Alan Partridge is a wishy washy, desperate side of the same man.
(Actual image of the TVC crew watching “Hot Air”)
Unfortunately, when Coogan steps out of one of his alter egos, his desire to make us love him turns into an absolute puddle of gel. Witness the ghastly soppiness of his Martin Sixsmith in Stephen Frear’s Philomena (2013) or the mawkish Stan & Ollie.
We hoped for the ‘hard’ Coogan and not the lachrymose one in Hot Air. We should have known better. It’s a fairy tale along the line of Elf without the humour or humanity. Coogan does a good job as an abusive, philandering American conservative radio host. His best moment is his speech on a talk show hosted by his protégé Gareth Whitley (Skylar Astin) although it owes a great deal to Peter Finch’s unhinged rant in Network. But the film as a whole is a mess of predictable, lefty mush.
Lionel’s niece Tess (Taylor Russell), whom he has not met, turns up at his exclusive Manhattan apartment when her mother is sent to rehab for addiction. How she gets there and why is all a bit dark but it’s convenient, because now Lionel has someone other than his long-suffering girlfriend/assistant Val (an under-used Neve Campbell) to hold up the mirror to him. Conveniently also, Tess is biracial, pretty and feisty. Just as well! There is some nonsense about Tess’s mother having disappointed Lionel years ago, more nonsense about a deal Tess has made with her mother, and yet more rubbish about a completely uncharacteristic attempt by Lionel to have Tess ’emancipated’ from parental care. It all ends well. Lionel mends his evil ways and Tess goes to college. We poor viewers however are left wishing that Coogan would stop trying to assuage his conscience and convince us all that he’s really a softy. He’s not and we don’t care anyway.
[Ed.: Tend to agree. Steve can’t do a Hannity or a Rush Limbaugh. Coogan’s best moments really are as Alan Partridge (see, e.g., Alpha Papa), Tommy Saxondale, and Tommy Wilson in 24 Hour Party People.] Continue Reading →This is a Robbery
(The World’s Biggest Art Heist) (Directed by Colin Barnicle) (Netflix, 2021)
The documentary tells (at Dickensian length) an intriguing story: how in 1990 two men dressed as Boston police officers were admitted to the elegant and boutique Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in dead of night, tied up the two slipshod guards and stuck them in a basement area, and helped themselves, in a leisurely fashion, to 13 artworks, several of them priceless (to use an old cliché).
SPOILER ALERT: We have to plough through 4 episodes to learn that, $10m reward notwithstanding, the works have not been recovered, nor anyone charged, so the public display of the oeuvre of such artists as Rembrandt, Vermeer, Manet, Degas, etc., must remain incomplete.
Several suspects are paraded, as if in an identification line-up, to tease us à la Agatha Christie novels. There’s Myles Connor, for example (above), convicted art thief, but he was in jail at the time of the robbery. Or Rick Abeth, stoner shift worker who was gaffer-taped (in an unconventional manner) after letting the ‘cops’ in, and who, curiously, is the only person recorded by motion detectors as having been in the Blue Room, from where Manet’s Chez Tortoni (see below) was taken on the night.
The mafia (Irish or Italian) loom large because of the apparent professionalism of the theft – even Whitey Bulger gets a mention – and the implicated crew, but for one, recently released from prison (tantalizingly ahead of schedule), are dead (shades of James Conway in Goodfellas?). There are several promising leads, but the veracity of Boston gangsters being somewhat moot, they head up blind alleys. And the mob generally pocketed pretty things to trade for early release, not to send to some sheik in the UAE or Paul Getty.
One is left entertained (particularly by the museum director, deflecting her own lack of decent security arrangements by a goodly dose of hand-wringing) but at the end of the day, the viewer, awash in dizzying timelines, charts, plans, flashbacks, cinéma-vérité scuttlebutt and a surfeit of padding, wonders what all the fuss (viz., this series) was about.
Instead, The Varnished Culture will make its play for that $10 million (U.S.), inspired by Agatha Christie, both her short story “The Apples of the Hesperides” and Murder on the Orient Express:
OUR SOLUTION: They were ‘all in it.’ The ‘cops’ were either Irish or Italian hoodlums. The guard was merely dumb and sloppy. The Manet didn’t go missing until the next morning, in the confusion – that’s an inside job. The gangsters stole to order but after helping themselves to the more chintzy, less valuable stuff (the Napoleon eagle, the Chinese vase) they parked the remainder in order to negotiate better wages, after seeing reports about the haul’s value. Then they were executed. In that they were doubtless devout if not totally absolved Catholics, one of their daughters at the time was about to take final vows. She had these to atone for the sins of the father, or was given them on licence. The walls of a chapel in some obscure convent in New England display the art, which is why, despite a $10m reward, they have never surfaced, it being a place where “ordinary material values do not apply.”
“Inside job? On the other hand, taking that tape off is going to hurt like a Cheech & Chong skit…”
The Witching Hour (Anne Rice)
In 1818 Mary Shelley created Frankenstein’s monster, a bag of bones held together with dead flesh and animated by gothic electricity. In 1990 Anne Rice created The Witching Hour, a 1,207 page bag of bones held together with dead prose and flaccidly animated by pseudo-gothic raving.
The Mayfairs are a family of witches who limp, from Europe, to a southern United States plantation, to the Garden District of New Orleans (Louisiana’s Gothic Central). Their bones are clothed in lush foliage, incest, madness, torture and incantations.
Pursuant to some vague female version of the entail, one woman in each generation inherits the massive wealth of the Mayfair family, the family emerald and the family demon, Lasher. Lasher is the handsome, well-dressed spirit controlled by the designee. Quite how this all works legally is not at all clear. All the better to give our witches money to burn, a spooky jewel and a creepy but passive ghost who doesn’t seem to do anything much. Nor do the witches, for that matter. The middle-however-many-centuries-of-pages of the book, is a rush through the Mayfair history – reading more like an outline for a series of novels, than a novel.
The novel is bookended by events in the current day, mainly a queasy romance between Michael, a hunky builder with psychic hands, and Rowan, a beautiful neurosurgeon with psychic hands. A centuries-old organisation, The Talamasca, watches the Mayfair witches and fills our lovers in on it all – at tedious length. Of course, Rowan, who was adopted, doesn’t know that she is a Mayfair and the one entitled to all that stuff, for quite a while.
The ending is the only point at which Rice surprises and interests us. But it’s not worthy enough reward for ploughing through a thousand pages of this sort of writing:-
“The pain came back into her face, again like a flash of light, somehow distorting her expression, and then broadening until her smooth face threatened to rumple like that of a doll in a flame. Only gradually did she go blank again, calm and pretty and silent. Her voice was a whisper when she resumed.”
Lasher’s Sabbat (Original etching by Emile Bayard, ‘Horned Devil Presiding at a Sabbat’)
Much More Than Scenery
Landscapes of South Australia by Alex Frayne (2020)
The Varnished Culture has hitherto grudgingly conceded photography as an art; this sumptuous volume has fully convinced us. Over 200 pages of beautiful photographic plates, in brilliant, vibrant tints or tasteful, crisp black-and-white, this is a book for a bedside table, not a coffee table. If one is fortunate to live in South Australia, it fires the imagination and galvanizes the traveller to breathe the immense and often desolate beauty of the State, especially in these days of border-hopping restrictions; for those of us who regard camping as akin to a root canal procedure (sans anaesthetic), then the book is enough on its own.
Whilst anyone who buys a palm-sized device from that evil toy company (Apple) can be a ‘photographer’ now, Mr. Frayne uses one as well, much better than most, plus a variety of more elaborate photographic tools, including old style cameras that produce lush and lustrous works of art, achieving a high resolution of which amateurs can only dream.
“Igneous” Kings Beach
Frayne wears out a lot of shoe leather: He ranges from urban Adelaide to its nearby hills, the famous Barossa Valley, the golden triangle of the Eyre Peninsula, the cool colours of the Fleurieu Peninsula and the Limestone coast, the Yorke Peninsula, the Riverland, the dry and dusty flat-ironed Mallee, the Flinders Ranges, Kangaroo Island, and vast northern areas of the state, remote as the back end of the Moon.
There’s a lot of life to these still lifes…Frayne hunts through fog, sleet, snow, rain, lightning, wind, darkness, and sun: he reveals the splendour of all nature including human nature. He even achieves a kind of poetry in a row of cows’ backsides at a trough in the green knolls of Meningie.
“Sub Goyder’s Solo Tree”, Hallett
There are photographic homages as well. His endless line of freight carriages at Pimba is pure Jeffrey Smart. His foggy lines of scrub with freewheeling birds overhead recalls late impressionism. The sturm und drang of his turbulent wintry landscapes evoke Caspar David Friedrich. Yet the images strike the reader as new and fresh. The terrible beauty of the Australian bush is here in comprehensive glory. In a useful foreword to the book, by Murray Bramwell, the sublime and evocative movies of Australian landscape are mentioned; Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Wake in Fright. It does not surprise that Frayne is also a filmmaker.
“Tree Study” Whyalla
This is not an inexpensive book but it is value for money. A photo-junkie’s dream, it contains a myriad trade tricks that excite and dazzle the reader – overexpose-the-shot-and-then-under-develop-the-negative, re-framing the shot, and so on. There is great innovation in these pages, but always leavened by a greater aesthetic sensibility. This work is a treasure.
The artist at rest: Alex Frayne
Two For the Road
(Directed by Stanley Donen) (1967)
Boy meets girl; boy detests girl (“If there’s one thing I really despise, it’s an indispensable woman”); boy changes his mind; they fall in love and then spoil it all by getting married. Then they compound the error by having a kid (breaking Philip Larkin’s dictum in This Be the Verse). Two For the Road, for all its self-conscious charm, relentless male chauvinism and fey hipness, is something of a breakthrough – a love story that deconstructs what happens when the love fades, or more accurately, transforms from its first flushes into a more mature kind of understanding and devotion.
Audrey Hepburn (a one-trick pony but very good at it) and Albert Finney (doing his best Richard Burton impression) are very good, even though they hardly age over the decade. That’s not too much of a problem because the film swings dizzyingly back and forward along the space-time continuum, centred on the various (and increasingly nice) cars in which the leads are sitting as they galivant about the French countryside. We don’t notice too much the Dorian Gray effect because we’re too busy trying to keep up with flashbacks, flash-forwards and the occasional flash-sideways.
Mark is the brilliant young architect; Jo is a brilliant young something. From a (suspiciously comfortable) poverty row they ascend to the jet-set. Instead of hitching around France they now drive their sports car onto a plane. But something’s missing. Mark deals with this murky lacuna by sinking himself into his work, casual adultery and a lack of attention to domestic duties; Jo falls into the spurious arms of chinless Lothario, David (Georges Descrières, sans souci in a fetching white skivvy). Along the way, their trajectory is interspersed with various memories of their travels, some of which are très amusant.
It Happened One Night
The best bit is where the couple ramble with Howie and Cathy Maxwell-Manchester (William Daniels and Eleanor Bron) and their hateful, loathsome daughter Ruthie (a should-have-got-an-Oscar-performance by Gabrielle Middleton). Howie keeps a book on expenses and sticks to a tight holiday schedule; Cathy (an old flame of Mark’s) snipes in a smiley way about Jo (“…how come Mommy said Joanna was a suburban English nobody?”) And Ruthie is….Ruthie.
Donen (On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain, Charade) knows how to handle stars and has an innovative approach, and Frederic Raphael (The Glittering Prizes) pens plenty of one-liners, some of which come with barbs. Two For the Road is a little corny, but as they say, the colour of corn is gold.
Continue Reading →À bout de souffle (Breathless)
(Directed by Jean-Luc Godard) (1960) (Adelaide French Film Festival, 25 March 2021)
“Roughly speaking, the subject will be the story of a boy who thinks of death and of a girl who doesn’t.” So said the Director, and that is not a bad summary of a shallow but hip tale of ne’er-do-well Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a Humphrey Bogart wannabe who is more like James Dean, acting like the poor kid In the Ghetto (of Marseilles): he borrows a gun, and steals a car, [and shoots a cop], and he tries to run but he don’t get far…Needing cash to fund his escape to Rome (at least he has great taste in cities), he shacks up with Patricia (Jean Seberg in an appropriately fey and throwaway performance, in which her Mia Farrow haircut, vacuous expressions and wonky smile are the stars). After countless slurpy jump cuts and several tantrums by Michel (taxi drivers beware!), she turns him in to the police, by which time he’s fed up with running, and dies on a Paris street, “à bout de souffle.”
The film was a big success at the time for its frenetic pace, cigarette-chomping, car-thieving, cool detachment, nihilism, narcissism, glib cultural references with several pointless Gallic flourishes, and disavowment of conventional story-telling. Belmondo holds it together in a charismatic performance that makes no concession to amiability, matched by Seberg in a role closer to Badlands than Bonnie and Clyde. The casual construction of the piece paved the way, for a time, to a new style or cinema (it ran out of puff fairly soon). It was good to see this on the big screen at the Adelaide French Film Festival, but the wildly uneven, jazzy soundtrack was set at far too many decibels.
