This is one of the strangest, in-some-ways-awful, in-some-ways-awesome movies I’ve seen in a year.
Before I get into it, let’s just list the people involved. Alain Resnais, in a creative slump similar to early 80’s Altman, directs. The script (and, indeed, the entire heart of the picture) belongs to Jules Feiffer, the kinda-funny New York cartoonist with an existential (and pseudo-intellectual) streak a mile long. Feiffer’s other scripts include Carnal Knowledge, but also Altman’s Popeye (there’s the connection!) and Little Murders, directed by Alan Arkin, who also directed the histrionic film Fire Sale, which is a lot like I Want To Go Home.
Adolf Green (yes, of Comden and Green) stands in for Feiffer as a very-American cartoonist “trapped” in France, yelling and screaming about how he can’t figure out how to use the telephones over here. He knows one setting: loud! and his line readings seem to be coming from Bob Hope’s cue cards. His suffering girlfriend is played by a half-asleep Linda Lavin and he has a distant and ashamed Francophilic daughter who looks like a man in drag.
In France he meets (of course) Gerard Depardieu, who collects artists. In the mix is Geraldine Chaplin (whose job it is to make bon mots) and John Ashton (!) who plays a boorish, Cowboy film director.
It all leads up to a drunken costume party where everybody yells and breaks things. Along the way, cartoon cats appear in thought bubbles and say allegedly funny things.
This movie is a traffic accident of epic proportions (and was a commercial disaster) – and a film I must get certain friends of mine to watch immediately.
