If surrealist film is your thing, you'll love this 1967 classic. If surrealist film that makes little obvious sense isn't your thing, avoid this film at all costs. Another way to look at this decision: if you hated reading Brecht in school or just couldn't get Beckett's Waiting for Godot, AVOID this film. That said, wow, what a film! I mean, I thoroughly hated it (even with the Goddard scholar voice over) but interesting to watch if only to see how far ahead French film was in the 1960s (and continues to be?... think Cache; think Irreversible).
The film is a road movie of sorts with husband/wife Roland and Corrine (who essentially despise each other) heading to her parents' countryside home to have the will of her father read (and eventually kill her mother). Course, the film is more than this: there is murder, utter anarchy, long epistles on French involvement in Algeria, Emily Bronte appears, a brilliant sweeping shot of a traffic jam in the French countryside (which is justifiably famous), the live butchering of a pig (don't squeam when and if you watch this as I'm sure we all eat pork and this is the reality of what eating meat is about) and cannibalistic guerillas. In the end, Roland is killed and Corrine chows down on him. Heavy stuff, granted, but an amazing comment on French bourgeois society.
My rating, for the bizarreness alone: 3 out of 10.
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