La vallée (The Valley aka Obscured by Clouds). 1972. France. Written and directed by Barbet Schroeder. With Bulle Ogier, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Michael Gothard. DCP courtesy Janus Films. In French and English; English subtitles. 101 min.
At first glance, Barbet Schroeder’s The Valley (aka Obscured by Clouds), with its trippy original score by Pink Floyd, seems merely to drag out 1960s counterculture by hackneyed means: a shimmering vision of the insatiable quest for self-discovery through consciousness-expanding hallucinogens, sexual escapades, and encounters with noble savages. But Schroeder—like his contemporaries Werner Herzog (with Fitzcarraldo) and Peter Weir (with Walkabout)—is too smart a filmmaker to succumb to the neocolonial clichés he rather intends to critique. Who better than Bulle Ogier, an actress who excels at playing women who believe they’ve been shaken out of their bourgeois complacency, to assume the role of the bored wife of a French diplomat in Melbourne? Is she really any more enlightened after her journey searching for a hidden valley in the jungles of New Guinea with “a motley handful of zonked-out hipsters” (Frederick Rappaport)?