Le hasard et la violence

I've only seen this in a dubbed (and possibly cut) version on a second-rate UHF station, so maybe I missed the good stuff. I watched it because I'm an Yves Montand fan and he's hard to find on TV. My teenage son watched it with me and we wound up calling it "The Beach Chair Movie" because it's set at the beach (maybe some rundown part of the Riviera in the off season?) and there are 3 or 4 scenes in which various people are kicking or throwing beach chairs around. I don't know what they had against those chairs. Not much else happened. I don't know what Katharine Ross was doing there. It was fun to get another look at Yves, though.

What a weird film, especially from Philippe Labro, a former journalist, great friend of late Jean Pierre Melville whom he saw dying under his eyes in a Paris restaurant, in August 1973. Labro was very under Melville influence and, as him, under the American film industry style too; see his other features. But back to this very one, he changes drastically of style, and after all why not? I would have never guessed it was from him if I had watched it without knowing the director's name in the first place. I am not surprised that so few people like this film. Some scenes, with the karate mad dude seems inspired by Jacques Tati's style; watch out the bakery sequence, but not the violence scene related to it of course. Tati was everything but not violence demonstration oriented. Don't try too hard to understand this film whilst watching it, just enjoy and think about it afterwards. I think that's the best thing to do. It is definitely worth.