In 1971, Jean Eustache films his grandmother Odette Robert. She tells him about her life: her unhappy youth, her marriage with a man who likes women, the death of her parents, of her children. She speaks about her tragedies, her life of humiliation and servitude, with a calm, almost neutral voice. In the same way she admits that “it doesn’t interest her to live”. Filmed in black and white, in a few steady shots and in a continuous way, this document is the real and moving testimony of the life of a woman of the beginning of the century.
Tag: 1970s
Two segments. The first one arranges six stories from Cesare Pavese’s “Dialoghi con Leucò”, taken from classical mythology. The second segment is taken from Pavese’s novel “La luna e i falò”: after WWII the emigrant ‘The Bastard’ comes back to his village in the Langhe (northern Italy) to find that everyone he knew has died and the war has deeply changed relationships between people.
A teenager runs away from a foster home after being accused of stealing a bicycle. During a storm a leopard escapes from a wildlife park. The boy and the leopard shelter on a farm, and the boy is able to treat the animal for shotgun wounds. When the farmer returns from holiday, the boy gets a job at a local kennels, while the leopard escapes to a nearby army firing range where it is in great danger.
Fed up with an escalating crime rate and an increasingly ineffective police force, blue-collar New Yorkers Willie and Cy join a citizen’s vigilante group. Their efforts to act as an auxiliary police force are comically inept, but director Ivan Passer lulls us into laughter only to catch us unprepared when he wants to play things in dead seriousness.
A group of people inside an underground complex which possesses high tech computers which tracks world events consider all options as nuclear war is at hand, air supplies may last only eight days and Biblical prophesy unfolds.
Vince arranges to meet Chi Chi, who he is having an illicit affair with. But she is killed in an accident. Vince’s sister fails in a suicide attempt but dies by electrocution as fog descends on the town, after a storm in which Vince is killed.
A stock-broker is stuck in a dreary job and a marriage that’s become a dull routine. To cope with the boredom and frustration, he resorts to voyeurism and extramarital love affairs.
For more than three decades, aging Iranian Mohamad Sardari has worked as a crossing guard at a desolate train station. Through the years, Mohamad has done little to stifle the loneliness and boredom inherent in the job. Meanwhile, back at his family home, life is similarly uneventful: Mohamad’s wife passes the time sewing night and day, especially since the couple’s son left to join the army. As time passes, Mohamad mechanically continues to do his duty.