MORE

North American Premiere (restored version) • Drama • France, West Germany, 1969

DCP • 1.66 • Mono • Color • 112 min

Directed by: Barbet Schroeder

Written by: Eugène Archer (dialogue), Mimsy Farmer (dialogue), Paul Gardner (dialogue), Paul Gégauff, Barbet Schroeder

Cinematography: Néstor Almendros

Film Editing: Denise de Casabianca, Rita Roland

Original Score: “[BD1] Pink Floyd”: David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, Richard Wright 

Produced by: Jet Films, Les Films du Losange

Cast: Mimsy Farmer (Estelle Miller), Klaus Grünberg (Stefan Brückner), Heinz Engelmann (Dr. Ernesto Wolf) 

US Distributor: Janus Films • janusfilms.com

 

COLCOA is pleased to present the international premiere of the restored version of More. Causing a commotion in Cannes and initially banned in France, Barbet Schroeder’s debut feature recasts the myth of Icarus as a cautionary tale of free love and drug addiction in the shadow of the May ‘68 Paris uprising. Fresh out of college, Stefan hitchhikes to Paris seeking to burn all his bridges and find the warmth of the sun. He is quickly pulled into the orbit of Estelle, an expat American exuding an irresistible white heat of sexual promise. Stefan’s pursuit of the kinky, free-spirited Estelle – perfectly embodied by actress Mimsy Farmer, whose cult following owes more to her leads in Dario Argento giallo films – takes him south to the hippie mecca of Ibiza. Despite Estelle’s questionable ties to a shifty German “ex-Nazi,” Stefan finds a small house by the sea where the two disappear into a private idyll of sex, sun and drugs to the rhythms of Pink Floyd’s mercurial soundtrack, until Stefan discovers her true weakness, and makes a tragic decision.

Unlike its more idealistic 1969 counterpart, Easy Rider, More doesn’t try to bring the viewer into the subjective experience of drug use. Instead writer/director/producer Barbet Schroeder, borrowing Eric Rohmer’s brilliant cinematographer Néstor Almendros, brought a detached gaze to the proceedings. The camera here is steady, as remorseless as the Spanish sun. The film’s darker take on the counterculture movement was controversial at the time, but in light of the disillusionment that came in the ‘70’s, it now seems prescient. From here, Schroeder would go on to a diverse directing career, from the European arthouse Maîtresse (1976) to more American fare such as Barfly (1987) and Single White Female (1992). He earned a reputation in Hollywood for thrillers like Desperate Measures (1998) and Murder By Numbers (2002). With his 2015 film Amnesia, Schroeder returned to the island of Ibiza, where, perhaps not so incidentally, he lived as a child.

 

QUOTES:

“It's 19th-century romance set to a rock tune on a portable cassette tape recorder.”

 –Vincent Canby, New York Times

 “More stands today as a visually true time capsule summary of the end of the hippie dream.”

– Black Gloves, Horrorview