Luc Beraud's directorial debut is a comedy about writer's block, and the first half-hour or so establishes it as one of the best movies ever made on the process of writing, a subject which, on past evidence (Dr. Zhivago etc.), has often been suspected of being unfilmable. Very articulate and introspective script by Beraud and Claude Miller; very accurate and very funny business on the physical rituals surrounding and obstructing the act of writing: all those superstitious little routines -- arranging the writing utensils just-so on the desk, smoothing down the dog-eared corners of the manuscript, and so on -- which might come under the classification of literary "primping." The narrative events get increasingly wacky as the movie goes along, however -- the despairing writer playing a suicide joke on his wife, with a plastic pool of blood bought at a novelty store (shades of Harold and Maude), or tirelessly roaming the streets to chase skirts, or getting swept up in impossibly nightmarish escapades. By the end, things have gone so far afield as to resurrect suspicions that the subject of writing might be unfilmable after all. With Jean-Francois Stevenin and Bernadette Lafont. (1977) — Duncan Shepherd
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