Most people find this film incomprehensible. I have no trouble interpreting it as the dream of a girl who has been reading Alice in Wonderland before she went to sleep, after a day of ordinary tensions involving watching the news and dealing with her family.
War and civil unrest in the news, friction with her brothers and sisters (younger and older), and the strain of looking after an an ailing grandmother - assuming those were the elements of her day - all come together in a neurotic melange in a dream. Thrown in also is a sense of vulnerability, a nascent maternal instinct, and budding notions of sex that might be expected of an adolescent girl.
With this simple key to unlock it, the film actually seems rather banal - a succession of vaguely disturbing scenarios with little intellectual content - it was content to be weird rather than clever. Nor did I find the cinematography more than routine, with Nykvist doing too many Bergmanesque full-frame faces.
I object strongly to the opening scene with the badger, whether or not the animal was actually killed, as it appeared. Malle goes on my grey list for that.
War and civil unrest in the news, friction with her brothers and sisters (younger and older), and the strain of looking after an an ailing grandmother - assuming those were the elements of her day - all come together in a neurotic melange in a dream. Thrown in also is a sense of vulnerability, a nascent maternal instinct, and budding notions of sex that might be expected of an adolescent girl.
With this simple key to unlock it, the film actually seems rather banal - a succession of vaguely disturbing scenarios with little intellectual content - it was content to be weird rather than clever. Nor did I find the cinematography more than routine, with Nykvist doing too many Bergmanesque full-frame faces.
I object strongly to the opening scene with the badger, whether or not the animal was actually killed, as it appeared. Malle goes on my grey list for that.