People are voting emotionally.

Admirable film.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

****SPOILERS****Gary Lockwood is 26 year old George Matthews a good for nothing moocher living off his girlfriend Gloria's, Alexandra Hay, money as he screws himself up royally getting into debt as well as waiting for his dreaded draft notice calling him to serve his country in the Vietnam War. Going through life as a dead beat after spending seven years studying architecture, he must have been left back at least twice, in collage he refuses to get a job and spends his time drinking smoking joints and leaching off his friends & family. It's on a sunny day in L.A while looking to grub off some money-$100.00- from his friend , whom he already owes $50.00, parking attendant Gerry, Tom Holland,to keep his 1952 vintage jalopy from being repressed for being three months behind in payments from him George spots the Jackie Kennedy look alike Lola, Anouk "Nookie" Almee, parking her late model car and in thinking that she's rolling in dough makes a play for her. As it soon turns out Lola is like him on the balls of her a** barley paying her bills as a model by posing for girly pictures and looking to make just enough money to buy for a plane ticket back to her home and 14 year old son in Paris France. Soon George falls madly in love with Lola even though she's broke and wants to start up a relation with her thus leaving his old and much younger girlfriend Gloria out in the cold. As things transpire it's Lola who takes advantage of the love sick George not the other way around first using and later dropping him like a hot potato, after a hot night of non-stop action, and leaving for Paris with the money, his last red cent, that he gave her. ****SPOILERS**** The worst by far is yet to come for George when he's contacted by his dad back in San Francisco telling him the shocking news! In that he's been informed by his draft board that he's now classified 1A and ready to go to serve his country in the steaming jungles of South Vietnam fighting the Communist Vietcong & North Veitnames regular army troops! It was a fitting ending for George who not only screwed himself up but all those who loved and believed in him and even he knew it. With both Gloria and Lola gone and not having anyone to leach off, all his friends by now deserted him, he also loses his car that he hasn't paid the bills for and, with no transportation to leave town, left to his fate. Only hoping that his time the US Army, if he survives, will give him the courage discipline and responsibly that he so badly lacked in civilian life!

The two protagonists here both quip at different points about how much they love Los Angeles and how evocative it is and this is a European fascination with LA I know in my body. Long before we knew this place was the Sunset strip or that one Venice beach, images from there hovered in our collective imagination through movies, deeply ingrained by what they suggest. It's a window to a world that - unlike ours on this side bogged by history and relics that solemnly demand memory - is still new, rife for discovery, exploration, guises, mystery. And this is the eye that Demy brings to LA as he has the man drive around streets in his convertible for the sheer exhilaration of floating through a place that hasn't exhausted its potential. It's not so much a matter of style or sightseeing as one of inhabiting life with unfettered presence.Along the way it becomes an opportunity to float through glimpses of Vietnam-era America about to give way to Nixon and more bitterness, as vital a document of the era as Zabriskie Point. The notion of heady freedom in the air and yet a telephone call about being drafted can send you off to a jungle death at any moment. Made more evocative by the fact that it captures uncertain life now and not - like The Dreamers - as some dutiful relic of important times.But for Demy this is something he finds there and commits to depict. His fascination is the return to a place he has already known - in his case through film noir movies - we see this marvelously as our smitten schmuck decides on a whim to follow the mysterious woman in the white shawl, he flips the radio switch in his car and the whole scene is now suffused with sultry noir smoke with sexual mystery that beckons all the way up to her mansion in the suburbs. He an architect - someone who aspires to build things that concretely stand up in time - swimming hapless in the transience of undecided life in his fancy car, stunned in his path by too much horizon ahead. She a model - posing for seductive glimpses of her that only see a pretty body - burdened by too many glimpses she carries from her past, stunned in her path by too much horizon behind. So he watches her all the way up to the hills, comes to watch her again in the sex shop she models for, snaps images of her but they reveal nothing. But they decide to meet again that night and in a way that we get to know her as more than image and this makes life fluid again, recalls the past, makes it face itself as transient, and in the end sets her free from the confines of frame and on her journey of return to where her kid awaits while he's left with memory of that night.We have known her all along of course, she's Lola from a film made a decade prior by Demy, now tired around the eyes by the dust that settles on life; among the photos is one from those more carefree days in the cabaret in Nantes.And so this is the crux of it, the return through images - watching - into some kind of life to know the distance. For Demy it's the return to something he filmed, for us to something we may have seen. The man in fact recalls the protagonist of Lola; you can imagine him imagining Lola imagining him. It's one of the most poignant movies on breakups, the anxious spaciousness of youth and those nights when sleeping alone hits the hardest.See Lola and this one, wonderful examinations of transience. The Before Sunrise/Sunset films are their image posed for but they end up with the pose.

This is a bad film, French New Wave or not. While I don't love this type of movie, even as an example of the genre, it's bad. French Writer/Director Jacques Demy (who I have loved in several of his other films) makes a mostly aimless film about a guy who has the personality of a paper towel...and it's all set in America. The guy is Gary Lockwood and I felt a bit sorry for him in the movie as he really had very little to do except exist as well as do things that rarely made sense. Emoting in any way certainly was NOT in the cards for this guy!The film begins with Lockwood in bed with his girlfriend (who, coincidentally, has almost no personality either). There's a knock at the door as finance company guys are about to repossess his car. He gets them to agree to wait until the end of the day and Lockwood spends much of the beginning of the film visiting various acquaintances trying to bum money from them. Finally, he finds a soft touch and gets the $100 he needs, but ends up spending it on a woman he just saw as he was driving down the street (Anouk Aimée) who poses for perverts who pay her to strip. And, as a result, he can't pay for the car. I assume this is supposed to be romantic, but the guy just comes off as a leeching idiot. Plus, when he announces that he loves her even though he doesn't even know her, he seems like a real creeper! The film bears some similarities to the famous "Breathless" ("À bout de soufflé"), though unlike Jean-Paul Belmondo (who also plays a low-life), Lockwood's character has no personality and is very, very stiff (in a bad way). At least with Belmondo, he had style and a certain rogue-ish charm. But watching a similar style film with none of the positive qualities of the Godard/Truffaut film, it's a real chore to endure. And, with a plot that seems a bit recycled, the New Wave novelty can't even be respected.A dull and unconvincing film, it didn't even benefit from being bad. If it been terrible and not dull, this would have been an improvement--at least with terrible you can watch it for a laugh!

Enjoyed this film from the very beginning to the end and the wonderful photographs of Los Angele, California. George Matthews, (Gary Lockwood) sets his eyes on a beautiful woman named Lola, (Anouk Aim) who is a model in a strange shop. George is having a hard time trying to find himself in Los Angeles, and he does not work, but has plenty of friends who loan him money and at the same time he is living with a gal who is getting tired of George being so lazy in life. There is also a finance company trying to reposes his BMW and things are getting pretty rough for George. You will definitely not be able to figure out how this film is going to end.