Raymond Queneau
Zazie Nel Metrò

THE REVIEW

Raymond Queneau was a normal person.

And normal people are the true surrealism of form. Because the lives of normal people are truly surreal. They don't know what will happen to them, why, how, and when. It happens to Zazie in 1959. They take her to Paris. And there she clashes with the surrealism of reality. Human caricatures of higher caliber. And all this bores her. 

For her, dreams are more important than anything. But everything is what comes between her and her dreams. Her dreams run underground. The subway. 

The "today" world she embodies when she opens her mouth, when she runs away, when she is herself, is the world she doesn't want to be in. And the way Zazie is young, which the adult surreal caricatures complain about, is more archaic than theirs. It intertwines. It's almost a contradiction. But it's surrealism. 

Uncles are aunts, sweet mothers are aunts, parrots are more knowledgeable than their extremely knowledgeable owners, the neighborhood closes in around the humans. The big city that once dehumanized now hides traces of human comprehension. There's beauty and discomfort, and it all belongs to Zazie; she doesn't understand why, strike a..., if she can't have the metro, she'll have the blujeanz. And the cops with whistles are the bad guys. We know it, we see them every day.

It's a world that reminds me of Tati's films, a simple world complicated by the surrealism of those who live it.

It's a normal world, normal like Queneau.

And it makes me feel good.