Word: lelouche
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...there you have it, or so Lelouch would have it, society has been effeminized. The intellectuals are dainty dried up men whose sterile concepts mark a lack of virility. And the bourgeoisie--like the manager of Van Cleef's who gets twitchy and makes clucking noises like a mother hen before rich customers--are a lost cause...
...Lelouch takes care to place his tale in the late sixties, though there is nothing insistently late sixties in the movie. It's more one of those timeless love stories than anything else: a middle aged professional crook holing up in Cannes to rob a fancy (Van Cleef's) jewelry store, is smitten by the antique dealer who runs the shop adjacent. He pursues her by as labyrinthine a design as the one he lays for the robbery. He's no wizard at mind-reading, however, and both plans backfire. The police nab him (for some mysterious reason he dawdles...
Society, for Lelouch, has gone either abstract and artificial or money-mongering. The straight world has been sissified for sex. To save your sex, then, you have got to leave society--just as Simon, criminal, has staked out the last male frontier, the rough, untamed places where men can be men. Witness his Western hero style, the steady shoulders and gruff speech, the way he follows his fate, the loner doing what must be done. He's like the old maid's dream boyfriend, daredevil to the world, all sweetness to her. No weaknesses, no fetishes, no perversities...
...matter that he's a thief; for society, as Lelouch sees it, is but a grand game of cops and robbers anyway. Simon merely plays the game with society rather than within it. When Francoise asks him how he came by such a profession, he shrugs, "I come by mine the same way you do by yours, out of need or by choice." He is obviously the moral man. He is also the glamorous gangster. Given the style in which he executes the heist--posing as a rich ice cream manufacturer, vacationing in a Ritzy Cannes hotel, driving a Mercedes...
...Lelouch spends a good deal of this movie making fun of his first success, A Man and a Woman--he has a roomful of convicts hurling hisses at it on New Year's Eve. Now you've got to credit him for not taking that first financial and prestigious success as artistic encouragement. And Happy New Year is a better movie--which isn't saying much--but not too different. It's as if he tried here to penetrate to the man and woman the first movie sloshed over with sentiment. And he ended up with just as pretty...