Zazie dans le Métro

1960. France. Directed by Louis Malle. Screenplay by Malle, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, based on the novel by Raymond Queneau. With Catherine Demongeot, Philippe Noiret, Carla Marlier. Zazie is a young Malle's inaugural poem to the anarchical 1960s. Both Malle and Queneau had in them something of Zazie, "An upright and unruffled little girl, who is always the only one who's right, who is never affected by anything, who is a way of looking at things" (François Truffaut). With the surrealist spirit of a rebellious adolescent, Malle attempted to do in cinema what Queneau did in literature, moving brashly between farce, satire, and slapstick, and subverting conventional narrative through intricate experiments in visual and verbal game play. "What was absolutely central to Zazie, something that I keep discovering and putting into my films more and more, is the fact that people—adults especially—constantly say one thing and do the opposite" (Malle). In French; English subtitles. 92 min.