I was recently told to watch a movie for my course in cinematic science. But noone warned me. I did not know this was a movie that you cannot watch and then expect to be the same person afterwards that you have been before.


I found a little gap in my timetable in wich I could queeze the watching. O-tone, i.e. english, never been translated in any other language. A quite old and therefore not too "hollywodden" movie. No explosions, not always music under any scene. I like that.

It was a sensation. I'm still not finished about this movie in my inside and I feel I'll have difficulties to deal with it in a scientific way.


A strange composition from the start. The whole movie is about the dinner of the first-person narrator with a former friend of his, André. They're talking, talking about what he has done and experienced since their last meeting. That's in fact all that happens in this movie, you watch and listen to the two men, mostly to André.
And how they talk! It is somewhere between surrealistic, astonishing, philosiphical, inspiring, frightening, after all - awakening!
They are talking about life and about death and of importance of things. They are talking about how we live according to our roles instead of to what is inside us, about masks and about society. They are talking about how comfort and habitation are so a dangerous things to us these days, how we forget to live and forget about the world around us. They are talking about anyone, including - YOU!

Louis Malle has always been quite rich and did not have to bother about marketing, about sponsors, about how his work would be selled. He was allowed to do whatever he wanted to, without justifying and the need of success. He is to be envied.


If anyone is interested in thoughts like that, I really recommend this movie. It is shocking and still relieving. So it was, at least, towards me.