Zazie dans le Métro

Young Zazie is brought to Paris from the provinces wanting one thing: to ride the metro. The metro is on strike. Left with her uncle, she turns the city upside down for two days; the adults trailing after her change identities, fights break out, nobody can keep up with the child. Louis Malle directed, from Raymond Queneau's novel. The book's game is in language: Queneau writes down speech as it sounds and breaks French deliberately. To translate that to cinema, Malle chose to break the image instead, with undercranking, cuts that obey no rule, reversed motion and chases built on cartoon logic. The result sits between animation and live action. Critics of the day divided; some saw it as a formal display. Catherine Demongeot, who plays Zazie, did not continue acting afterwards. Malle made this straight after serious work such as Lift to the Scaffold and broke his own style on purpose. Who it is for: viewers who like formal experiment and sixties French cinema. Who it is not for: anyone wanting orderly narrative; the film follows almost no rules.