A Girl is a Gun - English title
A 1971 French production [Moullet & Cie Productions (Paris)]
Producer: Luc Moullet
Director: Luc Moullet
Story: Luc Moullet
Screenplay: Luc Moullet
Cinematography: Jean Flori (Jean-Jacques Flori), Jean Gonner [Eastmancolor]
Music: Patrice Moullet
Running time: 100 minutes
Cast:
William ‘Billy’ Bonney - Jean-Pierre Léaud
Ann - Rachel Kesterber
hunter - Jean Valmont
Indian - Bruno Kresoja
Sheriff Holiday - Michel Minaud
soldier - Bernard Pinon
squaw - Kathy Maloney (Katti Maloney)
husband - Luc Moullet
with: Marie-Christine Questerbert
"A Girl Is a Gun" pulls a bait-and-switch on the psychedelic Western. In striped pants and a floppy pageboy, Billy the Kid is a gunslinger pursued through a barren, shape-shifting wilderness, aided, or maybe misled, by a heavily tanned, blue eye-shadowed vixen named Ann. Originally titled Une aventure de Billy le Kid, Moullet's bricolage oater was aptly, if impossibly, described by its creator as "a marriage of Duel in the Sun and Les dames du bois de Boulogne." Generally comic, Moullet's dislocations reach an unsettling pitch; the movie's sideways leaps induce a bit of Sartrean nausea. Dubbed into purposefully awkward English, Girl gives the stick-thin Léaud a booming Randolph Scott bass, the better to intone lines like, "Just beyond the snow is the Mexican border," and "I wondered how they found my trail so fast. Now I know. They got a dog." It's hard to imagine the movie working as well in its original language. - Sam Adams
Tom, Moullet and JM Straub are two totally different persons, who sometimes worked together, both making stylish, pop-art, experimental films without compromises of regarding normal views and thinking of filmmaking.
ReplyDeleteThanks Fatman for the correction. Noted and changed.
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