The immediacy of the images allows the film to express social criticism so unrelenting, and that's why the protest of some heartfelt feature films so blatantly clear and crystalline.
Harold and Maude, directed by Hal Hasby in 1971, keeps us hanging in the conflict between "being right" and "ought", between the attempt of the individual institutions grasped, and the answer, irreverent and ironic, to them. Harold is an eighteen
oppressed by a mother who tries to find a wife, Maude is an old eccentric and lover of life. Both spend their time to attend the funerals of strangers - it is during one of those who meet for the first time
- or to see the bulldozers destroying the buildings on site. Harold
mother reacts to oppression staging fake suicides and using a car as a hearse. The role of the two protagonists, as well as that of the relationship of friendship and love which they establish, are immediately evident from the very first scene.
Behind their apparent morbidity, attachment to the death and destruction behind the ridicule of their relationship, there is all the irreverence and courage to show what's really painful, absurd and grotesque it is within the social context of those years. The funeral
from which they seem attracted to, and who look with ostentatious indifference is actually the detached observation of the real death, that induced by the social system, which kills vital energy and imagination of people, imposing models of attitude forged, sadly attacked exteriority in exchange for a promise of the afterlife is unlikely.
A comedy that is the bearer of a claim gloomy and glossy, certainly aware of the difficulty of being understood and accepted. References
film
Hal Ashby (director), Harold and Maude, USA 1971
0 comments:
Post a Comment