After a successful bank robbery, Micky hopes to take back his girlfriend Marie who has been taken from him. On the way to Paris he meets Leon, a neurotic dreamer whom he considers an idiot. Leon can hardly understand what Micky is up to but he follows him everywhere and soon falls in love with Marie.
Sophie Marceau Tchéky Karyo Francis Huster Christiane Jean Jean-Marc Bory Michel Albertini Saïd Amadis Roland Dubillard Ged Marlon Marie-Christine Adam Pascal Elso Yann Collette Bernard Freyd Serge Spira Julie Ravix Azeddine Bouayad Harry Cleven Liliane Coutanceau Alain Flick Sébastien Floche Jacques Gallo Raoul Guylad Jean-Pierre Jorris Louis Lalanne André Obadia Jean-François Soubielle Alexandre Tamar Philippe Villiers Wladimir Yordanoff Show All…
성난 사랑, L'AMOR BRAQUE, Meine Nächte sind schöner als Deine Tage 2 - Liebe und Gewalt, Liebe und Gewalt, Amour braque - L'amore balordo, 狂野的爱, Eszelős szerelem (1985), 격정, Шальная любовь, Narwana miłość, Skør kærlighed, A Revolta do Amor, Šílená láska
Portugal
Fantasporto Film Festival
France
USA
Japan
South Korea18
Netherlands
Sweden
Germany
France
Germany
Japan
Netherlands
Portugal
South Korea
Sweden
USA
I hate reviews that say "What the fuck did I just watch?" so I will not say that... in those exact words. I've never read The Idiot, but I am fairly certain this is not a straight adaptation. (If for no other reason than I doubt Dostoevsky predicted the future so accurately.) What this film is is intense. It feels like we are being dragged along with the story, but the dialogue is being run through Google translate backward and forward until it only barely makes sense (this might literally be what the subtitlers did, for all I know, but there are suggestions elsewhere that the script is as nuts as it seems to be).
It feels like Zulawski took…
My third Andrzej Żuławski, after Possession and On the Silver Globe. This movie was described to me by Bob McCully (follow him, he's a good dude with excellent taste) as the subway tunnel scene from Possession, filtered through a crime/romance film.*
Obviously that piqued my interest.
Well, Bob's description was spot-on. This was M E N T A L. Mad Love is a movie where crazy is the status quo. Every character is unhinged, each and every performance is maniacal. It must be a real dream for an actor to completely lose oneself in an insane role (or, remembering an Isabelle Adjani interview, an utter nightmare).
The near gibberish nature of Mad Love could get old really fast but it…
"L'Amour Braque" or "Mad Love" is a film full of anarchy and madness. Directed by Andrzej Zulawski of "Possession" (1981) fame, this film takes the same respective dives into insanity intermixed with tones of sexuality and violence but in a slightly different light. Not billed as a horror like "Possession" (even though there are clearly some sensory embattlements that the viewer with go through watching this), "Mad Love" has more directional viewpoints of crime and challenging the class system. All this and an element of a love triangle is included as well, as elements of love and lust tend to bring out some of the most aggressive stances within one's embodiment.
This film is loosely based on elements on Fyodor…
Żuławski creates a world wherein characters are like asphalt flowers blooming violently, only to wilt with that very same ferocity in a white hot blaze of convulsive glory.
From the very beginning, we are dragged by our feet into an artificial world, cartoonish in its surreality and theatrical in its presentation as what we have just entered into is a like portal of hypomanic Dostoyevsky-meets-Brecht vitality. Mad Love dextroamphetaminally deconstructs love triangles and the heist film simultaneously, carrying the viewer from one plot-point (I use the word “plot” loosely) to the next by way of zealous-yet-somehow-seamless cuts. Frantic editing mixed with the often low-angle camera placements and exhaustive, seemingly pain inducing performances—not to mention the ‘Discotek enfant terrible circa 1985 on…
Andrzej Zulawski's L'Amour Braque blends a gritty crime spree, a melodramatic love triangle, and an homage to Dostoevsky's The Idiot on puree then sticks its finger in a light socket to infect it with endless electricity. L.O.V.E.D. I.T.
Opening with a bank robbery as masked assailants are literally kicking their feet in the air with glee before ransacking the place, a spazzy and drooly texture wafts in and then it just goes: brutal shoot-outs, food rubbed in faces, spitting, vomiting, glass-smashing, squawking, screeching, and quivering like a drunken pigeon. Somehow love is thrown into the mix, but frankly, every new twist, character, beat, line, motif, and emotional exhale is thrown in haphazardly, it's all a floppy wave of contorting performances…
Now, this is some CINEMA DU LOOK I can get behind!
Instead of the neon-drenched seriousness of Carax, Besson or Beineix, MAD LOVE delivers that patented Żuławski's brand of ear-splitting mania, but this time in primary coloured clothes posed in front of famous Paris monuments. Every single actor here starts at 11 and tries to claw their bug-eyed selves off the screen. It's goddamn exhausting, if deliriously entertaining, as things flatline on a fever pitch, as it runs in circles, humanity gone, and blows out your brain speakers.
I will love like an ice cube. Lost in our flesh. The dreamer is an idiot. Disney cartoon character heists. Manic shootouts. Theatrical and expressionistic acting. Sophie Marceau jump roping while doing a monologue. Break-neck monologues. Might be too frantic for some people's wavelengths. Going against the ones who silenced your artistic voice. What happens in L'amour braque doesn't make sense logically, as the formalist side of the manic director takes over. Every Zulawski archetype presented here isn't exactly taken seriously. Do you want to taste their love? To taste their order? Psychedelic bird talk kineticism in what-the-fuck form.
From that first chaotic bank robbery scene involving unhinged Disney masked maniacs I was hurled directly into this whirlwind of a film. Mad Love is unrelentless with it's crazed energy and frantic pacing. "Let's give every actor a ton of cocaine, spin them in a circle and launch them into the camera!" Yelled the director!
I don't think I've seen a more deranged and charismatic group of villians since a Clockwork Orange! A dizzying spectacle of violence, love and spiraling madness there's 0 time to breathe! Beautiful bare skin, intense shootouts, creepy yellow eyes, diabolic performances and the untapped insanity of a magical mind. This was a trip!!
I'm not sure what was going on narratively a lot of the runtime, but it didn't matter. Love when a film is able to have that kind of dynamism. 80s French cinema was really rich, and this Zulawski gem is right there at the top.
This has a sustained manic energy that doesn't wear out or ever become grating. There are comparisons to A Clockwork Orange to be made in that area with both film’s frenzied characters, but without the worst of the Kubrick film. Also with that manic energy it can get bonkers in a couple of scenes like a Ken Russell film, but its definitely a Zulawski movie through and through with it’s plot being driven by character and bits being revealed slowly.
Sophie Marceau is terrific. The new Kino Lorber blu brings out the thick and velvety cinematography.
In psychotherapy you learn about the "window of tolerance", the internal mental and emotional space where you process the world's stressors in a calm and rational way. The wider your window the more you can self-regulate.
Below the window is hypoarousal- lethargy, numbness, dissociation, and a refusal to engage with provocative or threatening stimulus. Above is hyperarousal- anxiety, panic and rage, fight or flight response, hysteria, violence.
Healthy people, ideally, don't extend outside the window. They communicate rationally, solve problems peacefully, and live in healthy synthesis with their environments.
Andrzej Zulawski isn't remotely interested in those people.
You know this if you're seen Possession, of course, but he somehow pushes further outside the window of cinematic tolerance, as it were,…
to survive you must forget
there is truly no one as good as zulawski at creating utter chaos
even more dostoevsky and zulawski are a perfect match
what’s better than wealth greed corruption lust nihilism and death emphasize by absurdist scenarios
the shots in this are choreographed so perfectly it’s insane and sophie marceau is gorgeous
"Throw me away, whenever you want, if you have to."
In which everyone acts superfluously and speaks in flowery superlatives, literally crashing through every frame to leave carnage in their wake that's a calculated, coked-out amalgam of emotional hyperbole and character-as-caricature work. There's a precision lacing the chaos and an overarching purpose behind its relentlessness though, the latter of course ensuring that we remain fully imprisoned by Żuławski's fevered gangland mania, the potential pejorative here being "imprisoned" as the whole affair is quite apt to never speed check itself. Loosely runs tantamount to its Dostoevsky-penned inspiration as it largely adheres to more wildly self-indulgent whims, love of course being the unendurable constant that morphs Micky and Léon, i.e. the homage-abiding…
