L'an 01

Some movies of the seventies seem to have been made yesterday;not this one.It's in fact one of the most dated works of its era.It's some gentler version of "Themroc" ,less pretentious, funny (in places) but not necessarily more palatable .

There's no story,but a spate of minisketches ,some of them witty,("There's no more property,so there're no more thieves" the warden says while opening the cells ),a lot of them tedious and repetitive.There was enough material to make a very good short,but 85 minutes it's inevitably too long.In a nutshell,let's stop working,let's stop producing,let's stop everything and all you need is love.Hence the title "l'an O1" (=year 01):why a 0,by the way?This is the typically "events of May 68 way of life" film.

If you like it ,try these :Claude Faraldo's "themroc" ,Agnès Varda's "l'une chante et l'autre pas" ,Jean-Luc Godard's " tout va bien"

It was Jacques Doillon's first effort.Although it seems puerile today,it nevertheless displays this director's intellectual ambitions.His best works remain the more accessible :the moving "un sac de billes" (1975)-which people who liked "au revoir les enfants" must see- and the strange disturbing "la drôlesse"(1979) which tells the story of A a hung-up young man who locks up a teenage girl in an attic.