Popular reviews

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  Review by Sam Prime ★★★

  Adriana: "I'm afraid..."
  Rainer: "Of what?"
  Adriana: "Of myself."

  Esoteric beachfront art house eurosleaze - or at least you would think so given that this was the first motion picture to ever receive an 'X' rating from the MPAA.

  Feel fortunate to have - by complete, random serendipity - read this enormously relevant article by Megan Koester last evening, as it - incidentally - provided me with the key(s) necessary to unlock and appreciate this movie on its own terms.

  Truthfully, this is a willfully obtuse and loosely autobiographical film about love, desire, and female psychology from writer-turned-movie-director Romain Gary, starring his then-wife Jean Seberg; a film where sex is a mere suggestion and perversity (that unseeable sickness) is the…

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  Review by ZeroCharisma ★★ 2

  For as big of a bitch as it was to find this fucker, it sure didn't make up for it by being rad.
  Were all of those dead birds really dead birds? Or were they just the result of a super on top of it prop department? I sure hope it was the latter cuz boy must that beach have stank if they were real...

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  Review by Adrienne_M ★½

  If this was a gift from my husband: directing me in a film based on a short story he wrote about me, I would be pretty pissed.

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  Review by Christian Molenaar ★★★ 2

  Takes the sleepy-surreal beachside eroticism of Jean Rollin as far as it can, but without any eye for artistry or sick vampires this never manages to shift out of first gear. If you need a supplement to your Rollin/Robbe-Grillet fix it’ll do in a pinch, but you’ll be hard pressed to find anything else here.

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  Review by Dmitry_Karpyuk ½

  Писатель Ромен Гари снял в главной роли нимфоманки свою тогдашнюю жену, красавицу Сиберг, которая большую часть времени говорит многозначительную чушь, проклинает свое грязное тело, спит с мужиками (это снято довольно целомудренно) и пиздострадательски мотается туда-сюда по пляжу, пока не встречает неудавшегося писателя Мориса Роне. Всё это время ее ищут богатый муж и его шофер-телохранитель. Пустая артси-драма, такая же претенциозная, как и ее в принципе красивое оригинальное название, "Птицы летят умирать в Перу".

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  Review by Ali Ranjbar ★★★

  Compare to The book it wasn't good. The Story( The Birds Come to Die in Peru) by Romain Gary is One of my favorite short stories.

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  Review by lemmycaution40 ★★★

  Dans la longue tradition des rapports cinéma/littérature, et plus précisément des écrivains au cinéma, les années 60/70 sont indéniablement deux décennies de grands foisonnements.

  Non seulement on y a vu émerger de véritables écrivains cinéastes, Pasolini, Duars, Robbe-Grillet, mais plus que tout autre décennie, ce rapport a entraîné avec lui de nouvelles possibilités pour le cinéma.

  Parmi ces nouvelles possibilités il y a ce fameux "cinéma mental" dont le parfait exemple se trouve dans les trois premiers films d'Alain Resnais, tout trois signés au scénario pas de grands écrivains de l'époque: Duras pour "Hiroshima", Robbe-Grillet pour "Marienbab" et Cayrol pour "Muriel".

  Le point commun entre ces trois films, qui créeront en quelque sorte la grammaire du "cinéma mental", c'est que…

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  Review by MaryamLashkari ★★★ 1

  She twitches while making love, like a bird about to die.

  ( I prefer the literary version )

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  Review by Sprinter24 ★★★★

  B movie film noir meets surrealist art-house featuring an understated power house performance by Jean Seberg. The isolation and sad desperation in her face always mesmerized me.

  Take that and combine it with decent dreamy beach cinematography and a smartly written script and you have one of the better psycho sexual films of the era, at least by my estimate.

  In the end it feels like the filmmker didn't understand Seberg or her character and that made the film all the more tragic.

  4/5

  
  I just hope a remastered video release comes along as this deserves a wider audience and wider recognition.

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  Review by Marc Kloszewski ★★½

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

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  Review by Toni ★★½

  Some good ideas:

  – The first scene does a wonderful job in disorienting the viewer from the get go. The camera is appropriately close, the mise-en-scene surreal enough. Also, I love masks.
  – The beach as a space where characters move forward and ultimately backward, search, stop, hide, wait, etc., some freer than others (the young boy is a trickster transgressing all borders?), is a good metaphor and gives the narrative a nice structure that it desperately needs.
  – Symbolically, the dead birds are ridiculous, but visually they are sort of striking.
  – The devilish driver is a cool character.

  Otherwise, this is Ye Olde European Mythologizing of Female Lust bollocks, probably sort of embarrasing even in '68.