Word: films
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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IGNORE THE TITLE. Director Coline Serreau's new film, Pourquoi Pas! is not yet another link in that chain of European fast--film cinema called "romantic comedy". It does not send its American audiences out into the night tingling with a Gallic glow--a glow derived from watching lithe, continental bodies tumble about in a variety of Kama Sutra positions. Yes, there is plenty of sex in Pourquoi Pas!, and all persuasions, but it is a natural extension of the plot and not the sole motivation behind the film, as is the case in anything starring Laura Antonnelli. The title...
That, in fact, is the secret behind Pourquoi Pas!'s success; the central characters are not free-floating gonads but human beings whose sexuality reflects their emotional needs. Although the film deals with people outside the established social order, they are not refugees from a doctoral dissertation on nuts and sluts. Serreau never allows Pourquoi Pas! to dissolve into a lecture-diatribe on the joys of alternative lifestyles or role reversals...
...year that passed in this quiet way was 1963, though it might easily have been another; the great events of that year did not mark the girls. But in 1963 Director Kurys was 13, Anne's age. She has dedicated the film "to my sister, who still has not returned my orange sweater." Obviously the commonplace events of the film have an intense and personal meaning for her. Some of this intensity is conveyed to the viewer, some is lost. The film offers a sense of the strong, often mysterious flow that when it is finished, we call...
YATES IS JUST as successful in creating Dave's friends. Moocher, Mike and Ciro, all potentially bland stereotypes, are well-cast and well-acted. Moocher, short but solid, is one of those kids who's never really going to go anywhere, but he has one of the film's great moments--when an employer tells him, "Be sure and punch the time clock, Shorty," he does, literally, and with style. Mike, played by Dennis Quade, is a pretty standard version of the hot-rodding, tough former quarterback--you last saw him in American Graffiti--but in Breaking Away...
...spite of Breaking Away's simple trappings, it is not without substantial themes; and the rivalry between the college and the townies is the culmination of a class conflict Yates has built up carefully throughout the film. Americans, he says, are as class-conscious as their European counterparts, but the manifestations are more complex and insidious than simply the blueness of one's blood...