Cool but a bit dated I've seen Harold and Maude, finally ! Not that I really wanted to see it. For me Harold and Maude was one of those movie you always notice on the video store's shelves but never want to rent. You rent The Abyss instead or something like that.. I knew it had a good reputation but I always had the feeling that a movie with Harold and Maude as a title could only be boring. Why rent that when you can go with Predator? And for some reason I always got confused between Harold and Maude and Miss Daisy and her driver. Maybe because they both have old people in them. Well this week-end, around a campfire, my parents said that when they were going out, in the seventies, they saw Harold and Maude and thought it was great. Great for the time or great in general they did not know. So I rented it to find out.
So ? So even if I don't think Harold and Maude is a masterpiece it clearly has the charm of the best films of that period of greatness in American cinema : the early seventies. I always thought that the main strength of movies like Scarecrow, Panic in needle park, The Graduate and, now, Harold and Maude was the blend of vitality and melancholy we can see in the wonderful way those movies are shot. The story of Harold and Maude is quite simple : a young man and an old lady fall in love and they share the best moments of their lives in a celebration of life. Of course the characters and situations are, for the most, original but I would not think it is as groundbreaking as some people might say. In my opinion, the similarities with The Graduate are too many to be purely coincidential. I like Cats Stevens when I hear him on the radio but I don't necessarily want to listen to his best-of while watching a movie. Maybe the production team of Harold and Maude took their influence in the use of Paul Simon's songs in The Graduate but in that movie we didn't have to listen to the Sound of Silence every other scene.
The acting in Harold and Maude is top notch : I especially liked the actress playing Harold's mother. She's something of a caricature but we believe it anyway. In fact I think the movie succeed the most in the fake-suicide scenes. That's where the movie is the most cynical and funny. When Harold rediscover life, tough, I think the director is a bit clumsy (when Harold is blowing bubbles for instance). Sometimes it's a bit embarrassing really... As for the last sequence I think it sums up the message of the movie : that Youth will prevails even in Death... or fake-death ! 7.5/10.