Malle: Zazie dans le Métro (Zazie in the Metro) (1960)

Zazie in the Metro is an adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s 1959 novel of the same name – a novel that was considered unfilmable due to its dense, allusive word play. Malle’s adaptation follows the same rough narrative as Queneau – it’s about a weekend in the life of Zazie, a young girl who travels to Paris to spend a weekend with her cross-dressing, “homossessual” uncle Gabriel. However, Malle’s adaptation emphasises a particular contour of Queneau’s Paris – the strike that thwarts Zazie’s dream to ride the Metro – as if the best way to translate Queneau’s prose style into cinematic language were to paint a panoramic, comprehensive picture of Paris without the Metro. Most immediately, that explains the strange, dreamlike hyperactivity of the film – without the Metro to contain and satiate its passions, the Parisian crowd spills out into the streets in all its oneiric energy. More specifically, without the Metro, Malle has to work extra hard to make all of Paris feel propinquitous, a jump-cut away – and, like Queneau, his visual puns, jokes and gags tend to revolve around portmanteaux, tableaux that combine different spaces, or different versions of the same space, within a single frame. Watching it, then, is an odd experience – on the one hand, there’s something positively liberating about this release and return of slapstick and surrealist energies into an emergent New Wave cityscape, but it’s a liberation that’s dependent upon constriction, just as Zazie continually finds herself trapped or constrained by scenarios that just seem to enhance her hyperactive ambition. In other words, it’s something of a cinematic lipogram – Malle omits the Metro in the same way that Queneau and other members of the Oulipo movement omitted certain letters or words from their constrained compositions. More specifically, it plays as a cinematic Prisoner’s Constraint, an Oulipo exercise that involves omitting ascenders and descenders – without the rhythmic, quotidian ascent and descent of Metro stairs, the Parisian crowd burns with vertiginous, vertical energy, culminating with an extraordinary sequence shot on the Eiffel Tower. By the end of the film, it feels as if Malle has managed to denature celluloid in much the same way as Queneau denatures language – there’s a twitch, or glitch, to the hyperactivity that gradually discorrelates the camera from the audience’s eye (apparently there are several gags that are only visible at certain speeds) and imbues everything with a subtle, subliminal discontinuity that captures Paris in every single frame, if only because no frame is truly singular.