 L'Age D'Or (1930) Like Andalou, L'Age D'Or pretends to have a linear progression, reinforced by sarcastically-employed title cards and dramatic music. The absurdity of the characters' actions seems random for quite some time, until a little over halfway through, when enough clues are given to start delineating the message being sent about Roman Catholicism. What seems like arbitrary strangeness is suddenly clarified as an allegory in which Christ (sort of a Great Gatsby-type) returns, quarrels with his Father by phone (God shoots himself), and rejects everything to do with aristocracy and the Church (hard to miss the symbolism of throwing a burning bush out of a window) … all in favor of love. Many indelible images are left in your brain, like four Popes chanting on a rocky beach, or those Popes' skeletons being discovered later in the same place by a passing throng, or the Gatsby Christ striking a rich woman in the face, or the Mary Magdalene Flapper sucking on a statue's toe (that sequence actually felt like porn!), or the cow on the bed. It's consistently challenging and thought-provoking, but, like Andalou, quite funny and a hell of a lot of fun to watch … much of it right in line with Monty Python. Perhaps most enjoyable of all is simply witnessing the evidence of hip, subversive coolness in a movie from 1930. Hipster cinema didn't start with Heathers, you know.
Review by La Fée |