The Second Coming of Suzanne

I bought this movie off of EBAY, thinking since Sondra Locke and Richard Dreyfuss were in it, it should be good. They were both in it for like 35 seconds. This movie was way too bazaar and weird to follow. I bought it in July, started watching, got bored, and didn't finish it till October. The movie is really boring, and eerie cause EVERYONE in the whole film is obsessed with Sondra looking like a hippie. **** out of 10 stars.

One of those post-psychedelic burnout non-movies which emerged from the avant-garde independent cinema fringe in the early 70s. The hazy, Gordian narrative concerns three men obsessing over a dove-like and rather pasty-looking Sondra Locke, who has been cast as a female Christ figure for an indie film production. Chockablock with specious arty imagery and pseudo-spirituality, the most troubling thing about this movie is its smug air of self-importance. Truth is, this film is an oblique, audience-divorcing pipe-dream which struts embarrassingly through its duration with impudently splayed tailfeathers. Credit due, it does exhibit some bold editing technique and camerawork, and sets itself afloat with a lovely folk ballad by Leonard Cohen.

Honestly, I have never seen such a wide load of unharnessed grandiosity in all my life. I think it's safe to assume that median viewers will find themselves picking little fuzzballs off their sweaters withing fifteen minutes.

3/10

I didn't even want to watch this movie after reading Maltin's review and 1 1/2 star rating. I watched it anyway on the advice of my son and found it much better than I expected. I would give it 2 1/2 stars out of a 4 star system. You have to watch the movie more than once to understand it all. If you don't know much about religion, you will miss a lot. I graduated from high school the year the movie was made, so maybe I can relate to it better. Yes, there is some pretension in the movie and it's weird to some extent, but that was the 70s so what do you expect. I can see why people might not like the movie; however, I cannot understand people saying it is boring. The movie is anything but boring. You will either hate it or love it. If you find it boring, you are probably brain dead.

Woefully 'ambitious' low-budget sludge concerns a filmmaker and his hippie troupe involved in the production of a new-fangled religious saga, with a woman cast as Christ. Independently-financed drama, a would-be dream-like parable (apparently inspired by Leonard Cohen's song "Suzanne"), is so meager in budget--and so sloppy in execution--that the results are nearly unintelligible. After a promising start in films, Sondra Locke lost her way as an actress before Clint Eastwood rescued her career; this is the worst movie she ever appeared in (ditto Richard Dreyfuss, looking embarrassed in the small role of a production associate). Writer-director Michael Barry openly apes Bergman and Antonioni, but he either needed more finance to expand on his (ahem) poetic leanings to bring this picture off or he simply had to be told "No!" The finale, wrong-headed and ridiculously bizarre, strains for "meaning", while the threadbare budget hampers any chance the actors have of sustaining interest. NO STARS from ****

I thoroughly enjoyed this film. Remembering that the film was first Proposed in 1970 and came into being in 1974, it is not really the hippy trip some suggest. Caught in the haitus between old and new cinema it attempts to explore the story of the passion through an impressionistic approach. The gender reversals are brave but work in the context of burgeoning feminism. Sandra Locke is as mysterious as she is effective, the three Mary's, here played by men are far more than they appear, and the dialogue whilst sparse is weighty. The production owes a lot to the late sixties populist style of say the Beatles films but also points forward to the work of Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway. It is a shame that these early 70s films are judged on their ( deliberate) failure to conform rather than on their contemporary achievements. The much bigger budget filming of Jesus Christ Superstar, or the tangled rhetoric of Zabriski Point, are more accessible but fail to communicate in the same way that Suzanne does. As an exploration of innocence cynicism and faith I thought it worked well. The second theme behind the film is the nature of film making itself. Director as creator, divine in the created world. When the discussion of the eternity of the soul unfolds the contemporary flirtation with reincarnation is more a reflection of the directors role travelling between the lives he creates, than a simple populist diversion. Naive this might be, pretentious it is not.