Saturday, May 4, 2013

Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing

Alan J. Pakula – 1973 – USA

It’s a little derivative of other more famous “woman’s-disease” romances and quirky mismatched lovers movies like Harold & Maude (1971) and Pakula’s own The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), but nevertheless, with a little travelogue thrown in, it works well as a genuine and humorous film about a troubled young man (Timothy Bottoms) who gets sent by his rich rather on a biking tour of Spain to get straightened out and meets a prim Englishwoman (Maggie Smith) a few years older than himself, strikes up an awkward friendship with her, falls in love with her, and shares adventures with her as they make their way across many a gorgeous Spanish landscape.  I certainly prefer Pakula’s trilogy of paranoia from this period – Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976), but this movie is refreshing because of its sincerity and mixture of drama and humor.

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