Synopsis
Zazie dans le Métro (1960) is Louis Malle's riotous French comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Adapted from Raymond Queneau's 1959 novel, it deposits an eleven-year-old girl in Paris for a weekend and lets the city fall apart around her.
Zazie wants one thing: to ride the metro. The metro is on strike. Her mother vanishes to a lover's apartment, leaving her uncle Gabriel — a transvestite cabaret performer played by Philippe Noiret — in reluctant charge. Catherine Demongeot plays Zazie with flat, total conviction, the kind only a child actor can sustain. The adults around her scatter and run; the city makes no sense; she takes it all in stride.
Malle took Queneau's anarchic language and turned it into an equally anarchic visual style — jump cuts, sped-up chase sequences, abrupt tonal shifts. In 1960 this was a formal provocation. Stream Zazie dans le Métro (1960) on iFILM.
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