Watch À propos de Nice For Free

Wow! Such a good movie.

Disturbing yet enthralling

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Cote d'Azur, especially its wealthy inhabitants.This is a subversive silent film inspired by Bolshevik newsreels which considered social inequity in 1920s Nice. Vigo himself said, "In this film, by showing certain basic aspects of a city, a way of life is put on trial... the last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution." Historically, the film is interesting not just for its class commentary, but for the involvement of Boris Kaufman, who was a virtual unknown before working as a cinematographer on "On the Waterfront" (1954).

The first film in Vigo's very short career greatly resembles the "city symphony" pieces of the time (in fact, cinematographer Boris Kaufman was Vertov's brother) but is more Bunuellian in tone, skewering the bourgeois and sending out a call for revolution among the common people. Vigo makes powerful, and often hilarious, use of juxtaposed shots to mock the idle rich and ultimately endorsing their destruction. We see upper crust types looking bored and lazy contrasted with the lively working class, unprivileged but vibrant. Surreal montages are used to suggest a stuffy man imagining a young lady in various outfits until she's nude, or another man suntanning until he becomes an alligator. Vigo's fearlessness in editing and camera movement is evident.

Jean Vigo is an unaccountably obscure master. His L'Atalante, a full length feature film is astoundingly good, although I found the use of bohemian theater props and the medieval Jean-Phlippe less original than Vigo's other work. The film Taris is a remarkable tribute to water on film. Water itself is represented in a way that transcends time, like Sargeant or Hokusai. The water of 1930 lives on film.But as to Vigo's greatest film, I say it was his first, A propos de Nice. This is a travel-documentary but it is also living history. The nearest comparison would be Mr. Hulot's Holiday. Much has been made about Vigo's division of the film into the rich and the poor, but really it is no more than a flourish. What is overwhelming is Vigo's eye itself. Nothing seems staged. It is life in the raw. One outstanding part of the film deals with can-can. Here we see what the can-can really is. Not the formalized line dancing of Pig Allee, but simply the gyrations of little girls still gyrating. None of us will ever be able to visit Nice in 1930, but A propos de Nice gives us a window. The excitement of life is there for us.

This priceless, jokey little movie has got to be one of the very first self-conscious assaults on the 'documentary' aesthetic. Purporting to do for Nice what Walter Ruttmann did for Berlin, in fact the movie is constantly delving below surfaces, or else simply defacing them, with the obvious intent of generating as much outrage as possible. There's plenty of shots of the various goings-on about town, but from the opening animation of tourist puppets being swept up by the croupier, everything is subject to the most explicitly subjective commentary imaginable: a rich lady is intercut with an ostrich; a filthy alleyway precedes a lavish ballroom dance; grotesque papier-mache parade mascots give way to closeups of the miserable guys inside the costumes, and soon the whole parade devolves into a violent flower-flinging riot. One hilarious scene cuts from street musicians to countless citizens dozing in their chairs, then to a shot of a woman, which turns out to be staged as we dissolve to her in outfit after outfit, until finally she sits naked! Another sexual outrage comes toward the end, as a gang of excitingly plain women mug carnally for the camera while we look casually up their skirts. Definitely driven by contempt, but it's healthy and well-aimed contempt, ridiculing the artifice and inattention that has typified tourist bureau cinema since the genre was invented. And it's more than justified by the mad invention and energy that the filmmakers apply to their polemic.