I liked a lot but it was Milos Forman's very long since I had seen nothing of him. So I began to doubt. Taking off is a slap, a rude awakening: Milos Forman is great. Great as a person because it combines research, radicalism, and narration.
It is 1971 and Milos Forman wants to tell what is happening among young people in the United States. He wants to show the great movement which animates them. It takes a girl, she invents a family. The girl runs away, falls in love, takes drugs. Parents are so hard they crack. It's a classic frame, banal, without scale. But this frame is there to support the madness of the staging, never ceasing to depart, to go well beyond the beaten track.
The first scene is amazing. It lasts twenty minutes and confronts, in his graceful montage, never theoretical, always inspired, two actions in two different places. The first is a law firm. A forty undergoes hypnosis to stop smoking. The second is a rehearsal room. Teenagers have to sing it before a jury, like an audition. Hundreds of teenagers, all of which are brief portraits and powerful, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking. This unknown location, where stands a hearing which we will not know the outcome, is a metaphor very bunuellienne (Jean-Claude Carriere co-wrote the screenplay), which Forman captured with force. Actually, it's a metaphor that is not one: it is the simplest form, the most concise and most just, what was the early 70 for adolescents United States: time of onset, a time where we sing, a time of reunion where individuality exploded.
Another scene later will echo this: the parents of missing children rose an association multiplying galas, and, that evening, a specialist in drug offers all members to smoke a joint. Bronzed faces, perms, glasses accountant: suddenly everything starts to melt. The drugs took them, their need for drugs became apparent to them. They slide against the stucco walls, sing anything, no longer control their bodies usually so straight. They feel alive. And this life is lawful for them that because their children have fled. It follows a card game where everyone ends up naked to push the song in full view of the stunned girl who chose that night specifically to go home.
What is striking in Taking off is the power production of the filmmaker. It is certainly not in the cinema verite. There is no pretense or concession to realism as an ideology. By cons, there is attention to what happens in front of the camera that is staggering. The film gives the illusion of being constituted as a editor of stolen moments on acid would be compiled. But the frame is such that screenplay never Forman not trying to make us believe that what we watch is what we see. What we watch is what he sees, thinks, and restates in cinematic terms. And this strange mix of fiction declared and truth of the moment is amazing.
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