In very different ways, all three films tell us a lot about what growing older feels like and chide us both for what we are and what we used to be. No doubt for this reason, they tend to irritate people, which is perhaps only just: irritation with the way things are is what mainly appears to motivate them.
They can all bore the hell out of you with their obsessions, but sometimes they can also achieve a degree of emotional catharsis that would not be possible without this dogged persistence. In fact, all three leading characters are so fully rounded that one responds to them as variously as one would to real people. As Eustache himself pointed out in his press conference, each has a vocabulary of about fifty words that is endlessly reiterated; these repetitions serve, in effect, as themes for the actors to run variations on.
Shot in old-fashioned black and white, and mainly oriented β both physically and spiritually β around the milieu of St. Running it as an official selection at the festival was a nice idea. As is customary with Fuller, the acting veers from woodblock-hard to awful-ugly automatically turning every face into a mug shot , the violence is corrosive, the double crosses mutual, the implications perfectly bananas, the imagination fertile.
As a modest entry in the Louis Feuillade tradition, this is a minor joy. He purchases this Sleeping Beauty, carries her back to the mansion he inhabits with two other women, and waits for her to open her eyes. Finally she does, immediately falls in love with him, and soon becomes a part of the erotic fantasies that the two other women continually perform for him.
A black sidekick and admirer played by Richard Pryor serves as another improbable accomplice to his dreams. Working against the languorous melancholy of this solipsistic fable are a lyrical musical score and gliding camera movements that constantly locate the action in a realm of romantic possibility that is never consummated β indeed, the sort of romanticism that exhausts itself before any carnal step is taken β weaving an arabesque around the stasis and void embodied by the dreaming hero, who remains the only real character in the story.
