The Smugglers
(Les Contrebandières)
With Françoise Vatel, Monique Thiriet, Johnny Montheilhet.
France , 1967, 35mm, black & white, 81 min.
French with English subtitles.
One of Cahiers du cinéma’s most brilliantly idiosyncratic writers during the 1950s and 60s (and again, for a time, in the 1980s and 90s), Luc Moullet is possessed of an equally unique directorial sensibility. The private and comic registers of both his fiction and nonfiction films have made them highly resistant to easy description and popular success. Among the best is The Smugglers, a defiantly amateurish non-adventure adventure film concerning three people off in the wilds with no skills whatsoever, made in advance of May ’68. In its terminally digressive, aggressively slapsticky way, the film manages to encapsulate an entire era. Called by Jean-Marie Straub “maybe the best film not made by Godard” and by Moullet himself as “the best film of Robbe-Grillet,” this movie about borders and barriers sports a cameo appearance by the director, who is listed in the credits as “pompous fool.”
