The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 5-11
More (1969)
Directed by Barbet Schroeder
Schroeder’s first feature film is probably one of the few whose soundtrack (by Pink Floyd) has been listened to more than the film itself has been actually watched. That the 60s hippie dream was anything but has been argued by countless directors, but what strikes one about More is the total absence of any rhetorical melancholy. The film, which chronicles the abusive and addictive relationship of a couple who drift from Paris to Ibiza with no particular purpose, is an epic-less descend into the meaningless spiral of two young lives that not even drugs can animate. More than ideals, what fuels the countercultural zombies in More is the search for money and dope. But unlike other staples of 60s cinema such as Easy Rider, there is no moral nor solution to this existential dilemma. The uneventful and mournful tone should feel at odds with the sun-drenched hippie utopia that was Ibiza in the 60s and yet, somehow, it comes across as the perfect match. Giovanni Vimercati (April 9, 2pm, 6:45pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Sound + Vision”)