Word: fossey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Quintet's tedium is in no way relieved by Altman's film-making technique. In place of his usual brio, the director has used pretentious cinematic gimmicks, monochromatic sets and portentous, dissonant music. He reduces an all-star international cast-Newman, Fernando Rey, Bibi Andersson, Brigitte Fossey, David Langton, Vittorio Gassman-to interchangeable (and often indistinguishable) ciphers. He blurs the perimeters of his images with Vaseline. Though two writers assisted Altman on the screenplay, the witless lines amount to paint-by-number existentialism: "Every time you cheat death, you feel the pure thrill of life...
...woman (well played by Jacques Serres and Brigitte Fossey) fall in love, but refuse to marry or even move in together for fear that surrender of independence will distort their personalities and spoil the pleasant relationship they already enjoy. All over the lovely corner of Provence that they share with the native-born peasantry and Parisians escaping city life, similar failures of connection are taking place. A man on the verge of old age makes a fool of himself by pursuing a sometime trapeze artist who slept with him once, but now rejects him with comical callousness. It seems that...
This is not to imply that all the misunderstandings of self and others in Blue Country involve sex. A man sells his farm in order to live in a city apartment, then decides to take up farming again. The normally equable Fossey becomes a raging hysteric whenever she encounters a man who she thinks is selling poisonously nonorganic food to her fellow citizens. Serres, convinced that a friend is being driven to suicide by a brother-in-law's financial misdealings, sets out to beat some sense into the miscreant. Naturally he sets upon the wrong...
...does not seem to notice that his new masters have unconscionably broadened the definition of criminal. Meanwhile, back in the underworld, Occupation spells opportunity for Dutronc and his pals-until his common-law wife (Marlene Robert) is captured and tortured by Cremer. The detective's wife (Brigitte Fossey) is, in turn, taken hostage by the criminals and threatened with whatever fate is visited on the cop's captive...