Zazie dans le Metro

1960 French comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Because her mom wants to get laid, the titular 12-year-old has to spend a couple days with her aunt and uncle in Paris. She has a series of adventures, none which involve her riding the subway due to a strike.

It seems like it's been a while since I've used the word whimsical on the blog. I use it almost hourly in my normal day-to-day communication though. I'm not sure if I've just not been watching a lot of movies filled with whimsy lately or if I've been a little down. Either way, this offering from an ornery Louis Malle either met any kind of whimsy quota I might have or acted as a pick-me-up. The movie's very French and very late-50s/early-60s, so much that I more than likely missed a little of the satire. But slapstick is a universal language, and Malle's dicking-around, though likely excruciating for a lot of people, was a lot of fun. This is just so visually playful and random right from the opening sequence in which a very tall man in a checkered suit, a character who turns out to be Zazie's uncle, walks through a crowded train station talking loudly about how bad everybody smells before a pickpocket, a recurring character, pinches a ringing alarm clock from his coat. The rest of this is cartoonish and manic, like a cross between those wacky Beatles movies and Looney Tunes with a pinch of Tati. There's a delirious chase scene that did seem to borrow a little from and the roadrunner and coyote cartoons, complete with a character named Pedro Surplus. Malle pulls out every visual and audio trick in the book in his quest for whimsy. You have characters flashing around, a silly French parrot, intentional continuity errors, multitracked crying, music box boots, children for sale, backwards storytelling, invisible violins, a character who actually changes races for a single shot, endless traffic jams, a stalking little person, a very cheap puppet, and a polar bear juggling flaming torches. Oh, and lots of chipmunk voices. You're going to have to have a high tolerance for chipmunk voices if you're going to dive into this one. There's a long sequence at the Eiffel Tower that I really liked, one of those things where it's pretty obvious that Malle and his camera crew just went in without a script and said, "Let's just film a bunch of stuff and see what we get." And they got some really incredible shots, some which don't look safe at all. Of course, this is coming from a viewer with mild acrophobia. I'm not sure what this all adds up to, but it's a neat little story that I had a lot of fun with. Oh, I nearly forgot to mention Catherine Demongeot who plays young Zazie. I thought she was really good here. I think her character might have grown and turned into Amelie. Demongeot, probably because of her Satanic name, didn't have much of a career--only three roles, the last before she was eighteen.