A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Friday, July 18, 2025

Near Orouët (Jacques Rozier, 1971)


Cast: Caroline Cartier, Danièle Croisy, Françoise Guégan, Patrick Verde, Bernard Menez. Screenplay: Jacques Rozier. Cinematography: Colin Mounier. Film editing: Odile Faillot, Jacques Rozier. Music: Daevid Allen, Gong, Gilli Smyth.

Jacques Rozier's Near Orouët is about the summer vacation of three young women from Paris on the Atlantic near the village of Orouët, the very name of which (pronounced with a final T) seems to set them into fits of giggles. But then almost everything does. This is a giddy account of nothing more than their summer of sunning, eating, drinking, sailing, horseback riding, flirting with one young man, and tormenting another. The tormented one is Gilbert (Bernard Menez) who during the rest of the year is the boss of one of the women, Joëlle (Danièle). He shows up uninvited after learning where she is vacationing, but his attempt to ingratiate himself with her and her friends is thwarted by the arrival of a more handsome and self-possessed young man, Patrick (Patrick Verde), who has a sailboat. The film is a trifle, but it's also two and a half hours long, so by the time it ends you may have become better acquainted with the three young women than you wanted to be.