Zazie dans le métro (1960) - film review

During a two-day stay in Paris, 11-year old Zazie is foisted on her uncle, Gabriel, whilst her mother goes off with a new boyfriend.  Zazie only wants to see the Métro, but a strike by underground workers prevents this.   When Gabriel’s attempts to distract his niece with a taxi tour of Paris fail, Zazie runs off to explore the capital by herself.  She comes across a strange mix of people, who include an over-zealous policeman and a hysterical widow.  Although she has been deprived of her Métro ride, Zazie still intends to have her fun, at the expense of all the adults she meets...

What is perhaps the defining characteristic of Louis Malle’s cinema is the complete absence of a well-defined style.  Not only does this accentuate the apparent lack of thematic cohesion in Malle’s work, but it ensures that his films are constantly fresh and surprising.  Whilst you know more or less what to expect when you sit down to watch a film by Godard, Rohmer or Truffaut, the same is never true of Malle.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in his third film, Zazie dans le métro, an exuberant comic-book farce that could not be further from Malle’s first two films - Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958) and Les Amants (1959) - in both style and subject.   You could almost mistake it for a Monty Python send-up of a Jacques Tati film.

Zazie dans le métro is based on the popular 1959 novel of the same title by avant-garde French writer Raymond Queneau, a book which was widely considered to be totally unadaptable for cinema.  In common with some of the director’s later, more serious works, Le Souffle au coeur (1971), Lacombe Lucien (1974) and Pretty Baby (1978), Zazie dans le métro is essentially about a young person’s coming-of-age.  The approach may be more theatre of the absurd than conventional drama, but the underlying story is one that Malle had a particularly affinity for, the turbulent passage from childhood to adulthood.  It is not hard to appreciate the symbolic significance of the Métro, the thing that Zazie is so desperate to ride on but which remains resolutely closed to her. 

Louis Malle’s funniest and most liberated film, Zazie dans le métro is an obvious homage to the comedy giants of the silent era, employing slapstick, sight gags and camera effects with something of the tireless brio of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.  The zany, often surreal humour reaches delirious heights - literally in the Eiffel Tower sequence (a reference to René Clair’s Paris qui dort, 1924) - and brilliantly transports us into the chaotic and colourful world of a precocious young girl who is in too great a hurry to grow up.  This is the film that established Philippe Noiret as one of French cinema’s leading actors, at a time when he was virtually unknown - he is gloriously silly as a preening cabaret performer of dubious sexuality.  Noiret may get the laughs, but he only just manages to avoid being eclipsed by the film’s main star, Catherine Demongeot, whose mischievous broad toothy grin and part-angelic, part-demonic persona have made her an enduring icon of 1960s French cinema.  

Demongeot’s Zazie is the Satanic twin sister of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel, not merely a rebel but an enfant terrible of almost terrorist proportions.  Don’t be taken in by that cute, elfin exterior.  She is a monster, a whirlwind in human form, brutally assailing the adult world with a lethal mix of gamine innocence and calculating malice.  Yet Zazie is also a victim, the product of a society that neglects its children and expects them to grow up too quickly, before they have had a chance to develop their own identity.  Ironically, Demongeot proved to be the total opposite of the character she played in this film.  Although she did appear in a few films after this, she soon gave up acting so that she could concentrate on her studies.  She went on to pursue a career as a historian. 

Whilst Louis Malle considered himself apart from the French New Wave, Zazie dans le métro captures the essence of the nouvelle vague more vividly than most films of this era - not only in the way that it challenges the filmmaking conventions of its time, but also in its uninhibited sense of fun and the way it tackles a familiar subject (the clash between child and adult realities) from a fresh and interesting perspective.  Zazie dans le métro is seldom accorded the same respect as Malle’s other great films but it remains one of his most interesting and provocative films, and certainly his most entertaining.

© James Travers 2011

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?