Begins promisingly enough, silent, in Sven Nykvist's low light dawn. A young woman, Cathryn Harrison (in fact only just sixteen), driving a Honda, encounters a literal war between men and women. She escapes from soldiers into the Lot countryside (south-west France) eventually stumbling on to a farmhouse (Malle's own).
From there on it gets seriously strange as she encounters Joe Dallesandro, Therese Giehse, Alexandra Stewart (who we just saw in La Mariée était en Noir), a load of kids, a fat unicorn, and some talking flowers. There's a sort of Alice in Wonderland resonance to some of it, and a weird way in which animals sound vaguely human, but it's not very interesting, it's not surrealistic, it's not really dream-like (in the great way Valerie and Her Week of Wonders was). It's just a load of confusing crap. It was a critical and commercial flop, somewhat unsurprisingly.
Even his son Vincent didn't know what it was about or what his dad was going for!
Harrison was in Images two years earlier.
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