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Rating: Simon is a young university student living in San Francisco, who nurtures a hobby in rowing. Blond, slim, and bespectacled, he is internally shaped by a sporting, almost military discipline. Simon is about twenty years old, and it's 1970, a time of student protests, towards which he seems to take a nonchalant, if not altogether indifferent, stance. At first, he merely films what happens around him, using a small camera to filter his impressions of the outside world, then the lens focuses on Linda, and it's love at first sight. He joins the university occupation, begins to intensely feel the reasons for the protest, and engages in a political battle parallel to a romantic one until a tragic ending.
Behind every film, there are motivations, and they rarely take on artistic aspects. It's very likely that if Peter Fonda hadn't produced "Easy Rider" in 1969, a (pre-tombstone?) monument of hippie culture, Metro Goldwyn Mayer would never have been convinced to produce directors like Antonioni and Altman, let alone the now-forgotten Stuart Hagmann, who actually directed "Strawberry Statement." It indeed seems strange to believe that a film about youth protest is the product of a Hollywood producer's machination, just as it is not surprising at all the idea that once engaged films were enough to attract youth, nowadays much less is needed, but that's another story. Coming back to us, it was like this that the producer duo Winkler/Chartoff entrusted Israel Horovitz, the screenwriter, with an adapted script from a bestseller of the era about the student riots in New York, "The Strawberry Statement," by journalist James Simon Kunen. It was all placed in the inexperienced hands of the aforementioned Stuart Hagmann.
Hagmann was indeed a novice in film directing (He directed only one other movie "The Girl in Greenwich Village" before returning to TV), but already a seasoned documentarian. "Strawberry Statement" indeed suggests the idea of a documentary due to the use of the camera: details are captured in a relentless and oppressive manner with continuous zoom-ins and circular movements, as if to present them without any euphemism, imprinting them in the observer's mind with the same criterion as a monotonous repetitive gesture. Some have wanted to interpret this particular directorial choice as a will to penetrate the observer's impression directly, without rhetorical frills or auteur virtuosities, an exuberant sincerity that makes one feel the nostalgia of the disarming discretion of certain directions, perhaps not quite within the reach of a debutant.
But after all, the project in its entirety arises from rough chronicle (Which, coincidentally, is said to spoil promising writers' style), from an affirmation of the Columbia University rector who wasn't concerned about what the students thought "any more than he was worried about strawberries." Blood comes only at the end, when law enforcement storms into the university to forcibly take away the occupants, intent on singing "Give Peace a Chance" (The soundtrack is undoubtedly the untouchable element of the work), a cult scene for the generation of the era and for those that followed. Along with the police, raw reality breaks through, making its way through the students' utopian ideals until it massacres them. Yet, to appreciate the true value of "Strawberry Statement," a hot testimony of the events of ’68 (saving us from "hindsight" apologies and/or revisionism), it is necessary to dig through a dense jungle of binary stories mostly derived from the protagonist Simon's figure: the love story with Linda, the friendship with a rower who converts to the student cause, brief encounters with sweetened social intent. But it is necessary to also recognize "Strawberry Statement" for its merit, that of launching Bruce Davison, an actor who went on to work with Altman ("Short Cuts") and received an Oscar nomination for "Longtime Companion." He plays Simon, enriching the character with lightness and humorous nuances, but above all convincingly.
Historical value indeed. Yet there exists a problem. The huge hand of Metro Goldwyn indeed casts a shadow of doubt regarding the actual transparency that a major can guarantee when producing works of system dissent. This way, the living testimony of protest would focus exclusively on the striking and plausible ending, which for the youth of the early seventies must have taken on a bitter aftertaste, due to the predominance of brute force, whereas those who have read "American Pastoral" by Philip Roth today will inevitably be conditioned in judging it as a simple confirmation of the incompatibility between hippie ideology and the intrinsic violence in the American spirit.
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