Happening
Marc Boureau
- 1968
- France
- Drama / Thriller
- 1h39mn
- French
- Black and white with color
Novelty
At the end of an exhibition opening night, Nicky by chance meets Charles, a renowned lawyer and art lover, fifteen years after an absurd evening they will remember all their lives, and which saw the death of one of their acquaintances.
Warning: this Happening is an exhumed rarity, invisible since President de Gaulle’s wife, just before the May 1969 events, had all available copies seized. Co-directed by Claude Chabrol but oddly omitted in his filmography, this violent pamphlet attacking a Gaullist bourgeoisie emulating nazis in memory of “the good old days”, still carries a subversive violence not easily be accepted in our present timorous era. The approach reminds of Jean-Pierre Bonan in his Tristesse des anthropophages (Sorrow of Cannibals) (1966) : a parable of a changing future, of capitalism identified as fascism; where the privileged regret the concentration camps but compensate by alienating consumers. Escaping traditional narration, Happening is something of a performance where visionary absurdism forces us to face the present: an experience in chaos.
Credits
- With : André Dumas, Catherine Ribeiro, Daniel Crohem, László Szabó, Antonio Passalia
- Screenplay : Marc Boureau
- Photography : Jean Rabier
- Editing : Monique Fardoulis, Jacques Gaillard
- Music by : Michel Colombier, Pierre Jansen
- Production : Guy Masson, Guy Pandolfi
