Quiet Days in Clichy

A bit of a strange film, this - from a Swedish director whose other credits include “Stop for Bud”, “Porno Shop”, “Wet Dreams”, and “The Situationist Life”. Unsurprisingly, it’s porn with art stylings (or perhaps the other way round).

I’ve never read the novel on which the film’s based, but his other work isn’t exactly lacking in misogyny. In Quiet Days, though, this seems to be used as the base for some hammed-up irony - Joey and Carl moan endlessly about how stupid women are for caring only about fucking while being oblivious to the fact that that’s all they seem to care about themselves.

It’s not a bad film - about 20 minutes of it is forgettable porn (nothing particularly gratuitous [or at all interesting, for that matter]), and the rest is fairly variable melodrama. It has the best title sequence of any film ever, but the rest of it is pretty much what you’d expect from a bunch of media studies students if you locked them in a cupboard for a year with nothing but a copy of “jules et jim” for entertainment, and then asked them to make a film about bored men having sex.