The most freewheeling of New Wave films takes Raymond Queneau’s “unfilmable” novel about a foulmouthed 11-year-old girl visiting her drag-queen uncle in Paris, and finds the cinematic equivalent of the author’s punning style in an orgy of outrageous sight gags, in-jokes, film parodies and visual games.
Excited to travel on the Métro system for the first time, Zazie is disappointed to find out that it is closed due to a strike. Instead, she sets out with her uncle (Philippe Noiret) on a madcap adventure that takes in Parisian life, a journey up the Eiffel Tower (and an extraordinary trip back down it), a brawl in a nightclub and a series of events that finds Zazie learning more about life than she ever has. In Louis Malle’s zany trip through the streets of early 1960s Paris.
Malle was just 28 when he directed his third feature and his first in dazzling colour.
