The Picasso Summer (1969) BQ visitors know by now how much I love stumbling upon the strangest, weirdest, most incredibly oddball movies of the 60's and 70's.......(one of this blog's Prime Directives).
Oh happy happy joy joy.......to re-discover this one. It fits every single one of the above mentioned adjectives......strange, weird, oddball.......and oh yes.....one of a kind. Even better - it somehow got greenlighted and made under the auspices of Warner Brothers!
Not that WB ever let this film see the light of a projector bulb. Judged an unwatchable experiment in artsy-fartsy culture-vulture-ism, they farmed it out to their TV division, who tossed it over to CBS....who finally aired it very, very late at night........
I'd slip into a coma if I went into the chaotic stories behind the making of this film......extensive re-shoots, re-edits, yada, yada.....and virtually disowned by anyone who ever had anything to do with it. That even includes Ray Bradbury, whose short story furnished the film's premise....(not sure of that either, cause I never read the story....)
So what the hell is it? I guess it's about the love of Picasso.....and everybody's search for their own personal fulfillment.....but that's just a guess.
Simple enough story.....young married couple(.Albert Finney,Yvette Mimieux) love them some Picasso. Finney's a disgruntled architect, frustrated he's only getting warehouses to design and build. As for Mimieux, she's sweet, gorgeous and smashing in a bikini. (And that's more than enough, since this movie needs all the help it can get)
With a week off, they zip over to France in search of Pablo Picasso....yeah, they hope to actually hunt down his villa for a meeet-'n-greet. They wander around on motorbikes, annoying all varieties of French people for Picasso's whereabouts.....and God bless those French, they all misdirect them.
All the while this travelogue unfolds,,liberally dosed with those split screen sequences that were all the rage in 1968, we come to film's key creative component.....
I speak of composer Michel Legrand's incessantly lyrical New-Age-y theme, which he proceeds to smear over the entirety of the movie's 95 minutes.......over and over and over and over and over again.....
It's like trapped in a sound booth listening to a record that skips at the same part....for a solid hour and half. It's nothing less that audio waterboarding, relentless torture.
And now let's come to the second major component. At least 3 times (maybe 4, I kinda lost count), the film erupts into wildly hallucinogenic animated sequences inspired by Picasso........blobs of primary colors morph into the twisted, bizarre and familiar shapes of the artist's famous paintings and sculptures.......and all of these sequences drag on to the point where you stop being impressed and start praying for them to end already.
On the bright side though, at least the animated stuff allows Michel Legrand to mercifully give us a break from that omnipresent theme and go crazily symphonic to match the dazzling visuals. It begins to sound like Legrand's working his orchestra into a frenzy to not just compete with the animation but overpower it altogether.
But back to our lovey-dovey duo. In the film's third act, Finney's futile quest to meet Picasso turns him into a grumpy douchebag......so he ditches Mimieux in France to fly off to Spain to meet a bullfighter friend of the artist, in the hopes of getting an introduction.
And here's where I lost my tolerance for this movie's twee self-adoration. In Spain, the bullfighter spouts all that Hemingway-esque 'death in the afternoon' crapola about his chosen profession.......
As if that's somehow suppose to cast a romantic, balletic glow over the disgusting spectacle of a poor dumb animal tortured with spears and skewered with a sword......which, by the way, this film depicts in full actual gory detail,. (So you sure as hell won't see a "No animals were harmed during the making of this film" disclaimer)
Screw him and screw this movie for showing this abysmal sight. Whoever this shmuck is, I can only hope he died from having a bull use its horns to give him an impromptu colonoscopy.
Then reunited back on a beach in France our lovey-dovey couple stroll away......not realizing that Picasso (a look-alike stand in) was on the beach too, happily using a stick to draw Picassos in the sand. Oh the irony......but not that those sand scrawls could ever complete with the flesh and blood splendors of Yvette in a bikini.
I'll say this much.....for adventurous seekers of the most odd movies ever made, it's worth seeing once. Only once. But it was never anything but a botched, misbegotten effort, hoping people might think it's artistic because it's all about art. Uh....nope. 1 star (*).
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