
"The French are a great people, even if they are syphilitic." - JoeyPlot SynopsisA pair of depraved young men mine the decadence of Paris for their carnal fulfilment in Thorsen's adaptation of Henry Miller's controversial Quiet Days in Clichy.
Review by Paul Higson from videovista.netJens Jorgen Thorsen's 1970 film adaptation of Henry Miller's novel, Quiet Days In Clichy. Filmed in Paris at the time that Joseph Strick was in the city filming Miller's Tropic Of Cancer, it could not have been more different from the Hollywood feature (nor Chabrol's later shot at the Clichy novel, come to that) and was a double treat for Miller making set visits to both. Thorsen was an artiste, filmmaker and hoaxer from the school of situation-ism, his belief system creation through free expression, at liberty from the workplace, commercialisation, politics and regimentation. Few novelists would find the movement complementary to the narrative form, no beginning, no end and no plot. Miller's novel, simply put, is two foreign men, in the Clichy region of Paris, on a sexist fantasy ride, from fuck to fuck, women hurling themselves at them, the men taking on all comers. The hardcore is very limited but there are many intimate moments, it's a crotch groping frenzy and the moral groups of the day successfully saw it banned in America, Britain and Denmark making it less of a name than it might have made for itself had it seen general release in English language territories, for it is considerably more than a porn film. Indeed it fits in neither the category of hardcore nor soft porn wavering uncaringly (as anything successfully situationist is wont to be) on the border between the two. The black and white cinematography when colour was king meant that exploiters only a few years later were unwilling to commit to it at a time when the harnessing of the vulgar and the explicit had been relaxed. Any arty accusations and explanations as to its lack of a vengeful return before the end of the decade don't hold muster either, the orgiastic in the film a constant contradiction to it and the whimsical interludes, odd filmic devices and time expensive montages, never doing enough to distract from the young limbs flailing around the screen.