La fille aux yeux verts

The only thing I had seen before this by Desmond Davis, was the classic "Clash of the Titans." That was perhaps the best movie ever made based on ancient Greek Mythology. It was a wonderful adventure and fantasy film.

This is totally different. It is British new wave with a camera that tracks, sweeps and runs across the British/Irish countryside as gently as it tickles Rita Tushingham's large nosed, perky face. Besides the energetic cinematography and editing which is somewhere between Goddard's "Breathless" and Richard Lester's "A Hard Day's Night," we get a hard edge slice of life drama/comedy that leaps with wit and poetry. Its as good as Tushingham's earlier, similar hit, "A Taste of Honey."

Lynn Redgrave is cuter than any human being has a right to be and Peter Finch is honest and likable as Eugene, the man who wins Tushingham's confidence, if not her heart.

The point of the movie is that we all change and we even "outgrow our friends". We should accept it without getting hysterical or dramatic about it. It is a touch sad, but we move on.

In a way it belongs with "My Fair Lady," and "Educating Rita" as a picture about women becoming...

All one can say about the movie in its entirety: "Smashing!"

This is a cute story about a young girl named Kate Brady, (Rita Tushingham) who lives with another girl named Baba Brenan, (Lynn Redgrave) and Baba sort of leads her roommate Kate around with her and is very talkative and has had plenty of relationships with men. However, Kate Brady becomes very interested in a man who is twice her age and begins to do everything she can to capture his attention. This man is Eugene Gaillard, (Peter Finch) who is a writer and a married man with a daughter and Eugene is not getting along very well with his wife and wants to get a divorce. Kate begins to get Eugene's full attention and before you know it, they are starting a strange relationship with each other which can lead to a great deal of trouble. Kate's family becomes involved and there are big problems facing Kate. This is a rather bitter sweet love story which is very true to what life is really all about. Enjoy.

Long into watching this studiously "small," slice-of-life portrait of a naive young woman, I was still wondering if the film would turn out, in the end, to have been worth watching. Earnest in its desire to be grittily true-to-life, in the neo-realist manner of the Angry Young Men, it is also clearly intoxicated with the quotidian lyricism and plain-spoken poetry of la nouvelle vague. It attempts to be charming and brutally frank at the same time, and manages, to some extent, to carry it off.

But will we end up caring about Tushingham's somewhat obtuse small town escapee, or Finch's sophisticated cold fish? Or will we be left with the rather sodden sensation that we've wasted our time eavesdropping on bores? For my part, I was pleasantly surprised. The story ends with the palpable sense that Kate has grown up a bit, and Eugene has grown a little older and sadder. We've looked on as two people have lived their bittersweet lives, much as we live our own -- and we're a little sad to bid them adieu.

To sum up: not as fresh and appealing today as it probably seemed in its time, but still rewarding and worthwhile.

Rita Tushingham, the it girl of British cinema in the 60's (she made a few pics w/Richard Lester) stars as a young Irish lass who falls in love w/a separated writer played by Peter Finch. Shot in beautiful black & white on Irish locales, this sobering romance hits all the right notes when a love affair sounds good via the heart but makes no sense in the head. Look for Lynn Redgrave (Vanessa's sister) as Rita's roommate & Julian Glover, who's still acting strong (he played one of the maesters on Game of Thrones), as one of Finch's friends.

Poor Rita Tushingham--she did seem to inherit some strangely frustrating parts.

In "A Taste of Honey" she was a young pregnant girl, first abandoned by her itinerant sailor, then landing in a "relationship" with a sadly confused chap.

In "Girl with Green Hair," she's another adolescent who falls for a man twice her age. Won't she ever learn?

Director Desmond Davis' work resembles Tony Richardson's so much that their styles are almost interchangeable. It may be because Composer John Addison also scored Richardson's "A Taste of Honey," and "Loneliness of the Long Distant Runner." It's remarkable how Addison's bleakly dissonant style so greatly influences the moods of these dramas.

With Davis employing a lot of contrapuntal passages played by a thin woodwind ensemble--often featuring a solo oboe--one does feel the emptiness and loneliness of character emotions.

There was no one who embodied the "Cockney Kitchen Sink" dramas of the 60s like Tushingham. She was perfect for her parts. Here ably supported by Peter Finch as a blase older man and Lynn Redgrave as a daftly talkative friend, Tushingham plays her role to the hilt.

By the end, the viewer has come to experience a limited encounter--rather doomed from the start--between a worldly wise Dublin land owner and working class Brit girl . . . the latter of whom is finally able to move on with her education and find acquaintances more her age.

The viewer during this visit has experienced some telling scenes of Irish-English life, and an interesting adolescent/mature fling at a brief encounter.