Film Forum

(1949) Budding anthropologist Daniel Gélin dreams of making a film in Africa and aspiring actress Brigitte Auber gets stage fright, as they and trés hipster pals Maurice Ronet (Purple Noon), Nicole Courcel and company hang out in smoky Left Bank jazz clubs (to hear American cornettist Rex Stewart, among others) and whip around sun-spashed post-war Paris – and the Seine – in their amphibious “Duck.” DCP. Approx. 112 min.

Reviews

“SUPERABUNDANT IN CHARM, WIT AND SOUL… Feels like a personal project for Becker.”
– Glenn Kenny, The New York Times
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“An assured comedy of manners, mishaps and misunderstandings that showcased the Left Bank jazz scene... Captured youth with a subversive energy that proved pivotal to the evolution of the French New Wave.”
– David Parker, British Film Institute

“In this film, as in its predecessor, Becker shot on location and used a great number of individual camera set-ups, cutting rapidly from one to another to convey a vigorous and richly detailed sense of the city and its people. It is an example of Becker’s exceptional skill in achieving an appropriate rhythm for each of his extremely varied films.”
– Konstantin Bazarov

“A teeming generational portrait that reveals a new tone and mood among young Parisians coming of age after the end of the war—a tone of joyful revolt against their parents’ traditions and conventions, a tone that they brought to the arts… A story of romance, of love won and lost, of crossing the line between work and pleasure. Its action depends upon the formation of a group that’s ready to make a vast personal commitment to independent filmmaking, but its action concludes with a frenzy of romantic gestures and an intimate tragedy.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker