If you want to construe it, this is a maybe difficult film: it definitely is not about gay lady killers,as some want to have it that way. The film juggles at least three stories at once, without any of them being actually central.
Yet the, let's say, narrative device is simple as life, as we come to realize at the end. A mysterious young woman, a Lithuanian émigré to Paris, is our entrance and exit to the film, without any of the mystery altered, just enhanced, and peppered by a grim political bottom-line:no one can be central when "you can't sleep" in the metropolitan modern heyday. Even crimes are not, in a -frightening- way, central.
The young woman, wanders her life in Paris, exposed to an alien culture (portrayed actually as a semi-culture), going into male-only cinemas to have a laugh (and it is in such scenes that the director seems to lure us into allegorical viewings), meandering in and out of a working milieu while we're not sure that anything touches her, except her car-to-car assault to a director(?)in the street, who slimly proposed to her (a date) after having just rejected her (for the job). And I think yes, she does not care as we see her come in and out of the screen, having worked as a cleaning-lady in a second rate hotel, and consciously robbed one of the residents, a killer. What can one make out of such a character? The film is structured by glimpses and a long traveling of redemption towards the end - so what can our gaze make out of it? Are we witnesses, peeping toms, idle passersby, outlaw onlookers? I would trust in the films suave experimentalism who is not afraid of juggling many elements and somehow does not bother with scenes who would be clean-cut with, or without, narrative function. The film is its own happy dream and insomnia, if there ever was one.
Simple as life I said? It is like taking straightforwardly the confession that happens round midway in the film about Martinique being ideal for a nonchalant living, picking fruit from the trees, swimming and fishing all the time and all that. It is the ironies in the film that are hard-boiled and realistic.
It seems appropriate to me that the film begins with the Law having one hell of a laugh, in a slightly Hitchckockian scene (as the one in Birds with the legendary God's eye view), yet the from-above does not quite work, for we just get a blurred by the clouds image of Paris.
All in all, it is a film worthy of repeated screenings for, as the poet says, "you suddenly spoke out of the margin".
Yet the, let's say, narrative device is simple as life, as we come to realize at the end. A mysterious young woman, a Lithuanian émigré to Paris, is our entrance and exit to the film, without any of the mystery altered, just enhanced, and peppered by a grim political bottom-line:no one can be central when "you can't sleep" in the metropolitan modern heyday. Even crimes are not, in a -frightening- way, central.
The young woman, wanders her life in Paris, exposed to an alien culture (portrayed actually as a semi-culture), going into male-only cinemas to have a laugh (and it is in such scenes that the director seems to lure us into allegorical viewings), meandering in and out of a working milieu while we're not sure that anything touches her, except her car-to-car assault to a director(?)in the street, who slimly proposed to her (a date) after having just rejected her (for the job). And I think yes, she does not care as we see her come in and out of the screen, having worked as a cleaning-lady in a second rate hotel, and consciously robbed one of the residents, a killer. What can one make out of such a character? The film is structured by glimpses and a long traveling of redemption towards the end - so what can our gaze make out of it? Are we witnesses, peeping toms, idle passersby, outlaw onlookers? I would trust in the films suave experimentalism who is not afraid of juggling many elements and somehow does not bother with scenes who would be clean-cut with, or without, narrative function. The film is its own happy dream and insomnia, if there ever was one.
Simple as life I said? It is like taking straightforwardly the confession that happens round midway in the film about Martinique being ideal for a nonchalant living, picking fruit from the trees, swimming and fishing all the time and all that. It is the ironies in the film that are hard-boiled and realistic.
It seems appropriate to me that the film begins with the Law having one hell of a laugh, in a slightly Hitchckockian scene (as the one in Birds with the legendary God's eye view), yet the from-above does not quite work, for we just get a blurred by the clouds image of Paris.
All in all, it is a film worthy of repeated screenings for, as the poet says, "you suddenly spoke out of the margin".