Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Cortechba Overrated

Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Charlot47 Reviewers have complained that this film does not capture enough of the book by Henry Miller and includes things he did not write. Of the additions, for me the frame story rings poignant and true. On the Californian coast we see the dying Miller obsessed by one last unconsummated passion for a beautiful young nude model, a recreation of the bewitching teenage Colette he had lost. Outside on the beach the ghosts of his old Parisian friends gather for him to join them. Then we move into his memories.Of these, the added stuff about fascism and communism in 1930s Paris does seem feeble. But my defence for both departures is that they are at worst ironic and at best comic. The real Miller and some of his friends may have taken themselves fairly seriously but in this film the cavortings and occasional soul-searchings of American exiles in Paris, immune from the harsh political facts of European life, border on the absurd. His devotion to Proust is treated satirically and to a Parisian his frequent comparisons with Brooklyn are merely ridiculous.In fact we see virtually no real Paris, the city being most of the time conveyed by sets, which deliberately distance the story to a dreamy insubstantial past. Like the artificiality of the book, the film creates a fantasy world, one of untrustworthy recollection from a gifted, persuasive but ultimately unreliable narrator. Though actuality does intrude when Colette runs away and jumps onto a very real Metro train, so leaving the imaginary sphere for the quotidian. While intensely autobiographical, incorporating wholesale people he knew at the time, Miller's work is fiction. It is not a diary but a melody spun out of his experience, looking beyond outward events to his inward poetic and philosophical reflections. This last dimension is what I miss in Chabrol's film, which mostly stays closer to the colourful surface occurrences of the characters' lives. Although I don't think many male viewers will complain about the often revealed surfaces of the many lovely women.

Claudio Carvalho The American writer Joe (Andrew McCarthy) arrives in Paris to research and write about Proust. He meets the Polish Karl (Nigel Havers) and they become friends and costumers of brothels and restaurants. When the fifteen year-old Colette (Stéphanie Cotta) arrives in Paris, they both fall in love with her."Jours Tranquilles à Clichy" is a dull and pointless movie by Claude Chabrol based on the story of Henry Miller and Alfred Perlès. The movie is boring and absolutely different from the other works of this great French director. My vote is four.Title (Brazil): "Dias de Clichy" ("Days of Clichy")

offenes_meer This film is to be avoided by anyone wanting to see something worthwhile. If you are a Chabrol aficionado, well, you might just want to quench your thirst on completing your knowledge of his filmography. Chabrol totally misses the point of the novel. Although he interestingly casts the two main characters as somewhat resembling the original Jens Thorsen film main actors. Nothing of the situationist atmosphere of the book and the 1970s film is preserved. The plot is located in the 20ies/30ies with some nonsense political threads thrown in. The 70ies film apparently was reshaped to the 50ies/60ies (without much mention, but the street scenes would suggest so) - and that actually made more sense. Chabrol invents two threads of a night club and the dying Miller which just don't make it and turns the film into a tedious experience of wannabe cinematographic art. Having re-written the plot does not help anything in this flick - it finally just goes nowhere at all. Waste of money and waste of time. Take to the UK original version of Jens Thorsen in any case, even if this is VERY bleak and 70ies-ish. If I were Henry Miller, I would have shot Chabrol for this. Another thing I cannot understand is the rating. NOTHING in this film justifies and 16 or even 18-up rating. The French rated it at 12+ which is about what it deserves. *grumble*

GComstock As a big fan of Henry Miller, I must vehemently trash this movie. The director misses the point of the novel completely, and instead INVENTS a tediously pretentious story around the most basic elements of Miller's book. It's an embarrassment, really. Miller and Carl's poverty is such a factor in the book, yet the movie's setting is extravagant and overblown. I had thought that the 1970 version was a poor facsimilie, but I see that that film at least attempted to capture the down-and-out feel of the book, the crudeness of Miller's language in that particular telling, and made some effort to follow the plot of the book. Andrew McCarthy is a snivelling newt with no charisma. McCarthy as Miller? I was cringing the entire time. I couldn't even bear to fast-forward the second half of this version. Dear god, avoid this waste of everyone's time. Why did the director even bother?