La Vallee
(1972)
review by Billion$Baby

The most important words on this art-house film's credits are "Music by Pink Floyd." Don't get too excited though, it's the album "Obscured By Clouds" with no use of any other material. Oddly enough, other than at the start and end title sequences, Pink Floyd's soundtrack is never played over the top of the fil
m. Their tracks are only heard when the muggy sound could coming out of a stereo in a jeep or a tent featured in a scene. As if the score is an embarassment or something.

BTW Could you imagine staying with the beatniks in this film? They apparently listen to the same Pink Floyd album every single day of the week.

Classic bizarre French art-house plot here. Bulle Ogier is an attractive French woman who is the wife of a diplomat who is away on business. She has an obsession - feathers. Yes, feathers. Her search for the beautiful feathers of a rare endangered bird in New Guinea leads her to meet up and travel with some hippies with a bizarre plan all of their very own. These free lovin' hippies are going to leave their lives behind them to go live in The Valley, an uncharted territory in the mountains of New Guinea. Their logic is that The Valley must be paradise simply because no-one who has visited it before has ever bothered to come back afterwards. With logic like that, it's no wonder that hippies didn't manage to change the world.

This is one of those films where it's actually rather charming in a boring "there's nothing else on the television bar this" kind of way. The photography is nice and it's cool to hear folks talking absolute madness in French. Bad points? Well, the plot might be stupid but it's also incredibly dull. If you haven't got a very keen interest in Pink Floyd and a quarter ounce of pot to hand, then please stay the fuck away from this film!! Worse is, I still kind of got into it and watching this uptight French woman turn into a loved up hallucinogenic freak-out, when this happens towards the end;

The beatniks decide to stay a while with the indigenous Mapuga tribesmen. Don't ever watch this film on LSD Floyd fans. It gets really annoying from now on in. 20 minutes of sacred chanting and dancing all set up for the cameras. The highlight of which is merely watching the natives chuff away on a dangerous looking jiffer or two. By this point in the film, I was still keeping a handle on it when they decided to show me the indigenous method for slaughtering their livestock.

Nothing is more likely to jar the mood of a seemingly chilled hippy film than suddenly watching natives repeatably smashing heavy logs on pig's heads. I had to cover my eyes when they started to beat the third panicking animal to death. Thanks a lot Barbet Schroeder but to be perfectly honest, I really could have done without seeing that area of the tribesmen's lives, honest as it was.

The disc? Mostly French dialogue with optional English subtitles to go with a rather grainy anamorphic print. No extras. The words "new digital transfer approved by director" on the back of the dvd cover hint that the picture would be of far better quality than it actually was. One for Pink Floyd completionists only as far as I'm concerned and even then the score is badly wasted.