La course du lièvre à travers les champs

It's not very good. I expected a surrealistic, bizarre movie based on the reviews i read here. Instead, i saw a drama movie with some laughable action scenes, more weird than surrealistic. Almost the whole movie is about Trintignant's interaction with the rest of the gang. I saw similarities with Paolini's Theorema, for some reason, this character enticed most of the gang. And this was unrealistic as hell, because he had zero seductive qualities, he was not even good with words.

But the worst part was his background. Absolutely ridiculous.

Yet, i gave it a somewhat high rating. It was interesting all the way until the ending. Whereas it didn't make much sense, i was kinda invested. Actors did a good job giving depth to those characters, and the whole interaction between them, was enjoyable to watch. Action scenes were laughabla but still, i was curious to see where it goes, and they were intense.

This is an enjoyable movie. Running time was about 140 minutes, not 99 minutes as it says here. Maybe i saw another longer version of this. In any case, this is definitely not a movie which every fan of this genre should watch, but if you lower your expectations, you'll probably enjoy it: Being a fan of French cinema, helps a lot.

Yes, i loved this film from the first minute on. One big reason might be the wonderful, melancholic, touching and fabulous soundtrack by Francis Lai, which i didn't managed to get yet. It's a real shame, that this masterpiece of film music is not available anymore. And for the ending : very touching !!! Knowing, that Ryan had cancer when filming makes the ending more touching. I wish, this film and its soundtrack gets the treatment it deserves (Criterion Collection anyone ?!). A nice uncut (french version is uncut, the German one is cut) version on DVD and a soundtrack re-release and i'm in heaven !

I have always loved this movie, since the first time I saw it, during the late seventies. First because of the story and characters, and of course thanks of the Francis Lai's superb score, so sad, so melancholic, in the perfect mood of the story. The tale of characters facing their fate, their doom, fighting in a struggle lost in advance. I am not surprised that 90% of audiences don't like this feature, even the old timers like me. I don't even speak of modern audiences. I can't explain the link between the kid's sequences, in the beginning and the very end, and the adult's ones. Is the young kid Jean Louis Trintignant's character when he was a child? Robert Ryan, at his ever peak, one year before his death. yes, I love this film.

Even before the film gets underway, we've had... a Freudian scene of children playing in a French street (one boy slices open another's bag of marbles, which tumble down some steps), a shot of drum majorettes marching round a Canadian field, a full-blown homage to Sergio Leone, a couple of Lewis Carroll references, and some near-subliminal freeze-frames of dead children in black-and-white. And all this before the opening credits have finished.

"La course du lièvre..." is a film bristling with tantalising ideas, not all of which are fully resolved or explained. One major theme is that of childhood and games, though the point that René Clément seems to be making, that we are all just big children, is perhaps less interesting than the fun he has expressing it. At its simplest level, this is a slightly tongue-in-cheek Western-style caper movie; for much of the time we can even forget that we're in modern-day Montreal, as the long middle section in which Jean-Louis Trintignant's enigmatic "Froggy" is gradually accepted into Robert Ryan's gang is set in and around a backwoods cabin that wouldn't be out of place in a Peckinpah movie.

Though Trintignant and Ryan are never less than fascinating to watch, particularly in their scenes together as the power balance gradually shifts between them, this is one of those films (unlike Clément's "Plein soleil") where the whole really doesn't go beyond the sum of the parts. It's a film to enjoy for the intelligence and inventiveness of the script, and above all for the virtuosic flair of Clément's direction, particularly in the long chase sequence immediately following the credits, starting with Trintignant leaping off a moving train and ending with him pushing a man out of a moving car. The heist scene later on, involving a fire engine inside a skyscraper, is actually a little disappointing, the consequence perhaps of the director trying a little too hard to achieve a "wow" response.

Ryan, by the way, had such difficulty learning the French dialogue for this film, that Clément gave him gibberish lines to speak, just so that he could get the mouth movements right for later dubbing (Aldo Ray, on the other hand, learnt his lines phonetically). Watch out for Emmanuelle Béart's uncredited film début as "girl eating cake" during the opening sequence.

It's not a coincidence that "La Course Du Lievre A Travers Les Champs" opens with a Lewis Carroll quote: this picture has more in common with "Alice In Wonderland" than any caper film (the genre it technically belongs to). It is an extremely offbeat, wildly unconventional film, with a nightmarish, surrealistic quality: there is hardly a frame or a line of dialogue in it that is "normal" or predictable. It is way too drawn-out in its storytelling to be wholly successful (the wheels of the plot are not set in motion until the last quarter (!) of its 141-minute running time), but it's certainly a unique experience. Great international cast, with a stunning contrast between exotic beauty Lea Massari and girl-next-door beauty Tisa Farrow. **1/2 out of 4.