Word: gorgeousness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SUCH A GORGEOUS Kid Like Me is a funny movie. Now, The 400 Blows was a zany movie. Shoot the Piano Player was a really zany movie. But this is about as zany overall as Mississippi Mermaid. I laughed, in spots, as raucously as you can laugh in a nearly empty screening room. And I was swept, protesting, into a story I considered not only tired, but even maudlin in spots. The problem is that I, weaned as an appreciative viewer of foreign films on Truffaut, have come to expect perhaps too much of him. There is the inevitable disappointment...
...turns out that Truffaut isn't interested in genius. What surfaces here is caution. Stylistically, and structurally, we've all seen the match of Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me. In fact, the movie's most flamboyant technical act are its credits. They are highly contrasted, so that there are no middle ground greys, and then tinted in vivid pinks, greens, and oranges. A sequence of a car passing through the countryside, the effect is very surreal...
...these vignettes that Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me stands. Truffaut is able to return to his influences and loves, and make sequences reminiscent of the chaos of his earlier films. They are numerous, and of nearly equal quality, but their prime value is to allow the director to characterize. And this film is filled with characters. Husband Clovis (Philippe Leotard), a drunken, brawling, truly ignorant ass of a man, whose battered, yet ornamented bright red Peugeot echoes so many street-customized '57 Chevies; who is introduced by his racy two-toned shoes. Saloon singer Sam Golden (Guy Marchand), Truffaut...
...August, as he knows, he would not have stood much chance. But it is November, the bitter end of the season, and the girls still to be found will settle for less, which is to say for Bert. He worms his way to the good side of a gorgeous and lonely barmaid named Bella, only to find that she has an identical twin named Nellie. How to capitalize on this embarrassment of wenches? Bert invents his own identical twin, Fred, who shares the special job with him and thus can only appear when he, Bert, is at work. He marries...
Deftly played by Charles Grodin, Lenny is a half brother to Alex Portnoy, whose adolescent reverie while he watched "the gentile girls" ice-skating at night ("How do they get so gorgeous, so healthy, so blonde?") might make a good epigraph for The Heartbreak Kid. Lenny's hangdog adoration of Kelly, the definitive homecoming queen, turns him into exactly the kind of chattering fool that Lila was. One of the crucial problems with the movie is that Shepherd, who is ideally icy in the earlier Miami scenes, cannot manage the difficult transition into actually caring for Lenny. Even...