Word: films
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This is classic Truffaut technique, but despite uniformly vivid performances, the film never attains its promised emotional complexity. The major difficulty is the director's determination to turn Love on the Run into a retrospective of the entire Doinel cycle. Not only do old players reappear, including Marie-France Pisier of Love at 20 (1962), but so do clips from the other films. It may be a laudably ambi tious notion to refract the past through the present in such purely cinematic terms, but there is too much material to be digest ed in one movie. Too often Truffaut...
...back, but the other three press on. Two of them (along with a teacher answering some mysterious impulse to join them) are never seen again. One girl is rescued some days later but never speaks about what may or may not have happened on Hanging Rock. Nor does the film, based on a thriller by Joan Lindsay, offer any definite explanation. It does explore the rational efforts to solve the mystery (two young men who were near by seem likely suspects at first), and it examines how the tragedy affects the various interested parties in the aftermath...
...could be objected that this failure to come up with a realistic denouement is a fault, but it is one that the film shares with works like L'Avventura and Blow-Up, whose director, Michelangelo Antonioni, has obviously had an influence on Peter Weir. As in the master's work, the criminal, if there is one, is society. It does not matter to Weir whether there was a sexual criminal lurking up there among the rocks, awaiting these young women who are easy prey, or if their own erotic repression led to some self-destructive hysterical...
This horrific tale is told with marvelous shadowy indirection and delicate lyricism. It is full of enigmatic silences, which create a nice, ironic tension between the film's genteel manner and its really quite ferocious theme. It may be seen as a mature exercise in style by a young director, if for no other reason. In addition, it is the centerpiece, so far, of the revitalized Australian film industry and the first assured work by a director who could gain an international reputation. -Richard Schickel
...away from Michael for ever. The pact is sealed, and Nancy gets some new flesh to go with her stitches. With the help of a shrink, she even man ages to keep her head while losing her face. That would be that, but ... Enter "the promise." Earlier in the film, Michael had given Nancy a vow: "I promise I'll never say goodbye to you." Now how can Michael never say goodbye to Nancy if he can't even find her to say hello? Intrepid moviegoers will have to experience the startling resolution of this dilemma for themselves...