Zazie Dans Le Metro (1960)

When she comes to Paris to visit her lover, a woman (Odette Piquet) leaves her precocious and impudent 10 year old daughter (Catherine Demongeot) in the care of her uncle (Philippe Noiret, CINEMA PARADISO), a drag performer in a nightclub. Louis Malle's cheeky comedy is both a one of a kind farce (certainly I've never seen anything quite like it) and a homage to the great silent comedies. The film creates its own unique frantic rhythm and if one doesn't get on board, you're likely to get disoriented. Characters morph into other characters, ethnicities are changed for a second and back again, sets are changed before our very eyes as the actors continue, eyeglasses fall off someone's face at the top of the Eiffel Tower and smoothly land on the face of someone below, etc. If one attempts to make literal sense of it, you'll go crazy! Possibly the film may be a fantasy of the child Zazie's imagination but more than likely, Malle is skewering the foibles of contemporary (well, 1960 contemporary) society via his own twist on ALICE IN WONDERLAND. Based on the novel by Raymond Queneau. With Vittorio Caprioli, Yvonne Clech and Carla Marlier.