Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes

(Les mauvaises fréquentations/Du côté de Robinson). “When I play, I win,” declares one of a pair of not-so-lovable losers in this breezily abrasive featurette, Eustache’s first. The suburban-Parisian protagonists pass an afternoon playing pinball and trying to play the field. Picking up a young mother, they lift her wallet and then wonder what to do with it. Combining casual observation of setting and character with discomfiting moral overtones, the film both reflects its New Wave moment and forecasts Eustache’s particular preoccupations.

—Juliet Clark

• Written by Eustache. Photographed by Philippe Théaudière, Michel H. Robert. With Aristide, Daniel Bart, Dominique Jayr. (40 mins, In French with English electronic titles, B&W, 35mm, From Tamasa/Connaissance du Cinéma)

Followed by:
Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes
Jean Eustache (France, 1965)

(Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus). Set in a gray, wintry Narbonne, this was Eustache’s first film with Jean-Pierre Léaud as his alter ego. Impoverished, yearning for a fashionable duffel coat, and getting nowhere with girls, young Daniel (Léaud) finds that a stint as a street-corner Santa solves all three problems, at least temporarily. (Léaud’s Alexandre in The Mother and the Whore refers to this escapade.) The film was produced by Jean-Luc Godard and shot on stock left over from the making of Masculine Feminine, but in mood and approach it is more reminiscent of Rohmer.

• Written by Eustache. Photographed by Philippe Théaudière. With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Gérard Zimmermann, Henri Martinez, René Gilson. (47 mins, In French with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From MAE, permission Tamasa/Connaissance du Cinéma)

• (Total running time: 87 mins)