France société anonyme [France incorporated] (1974)

(On Cable TV, June 2021) There are times where, upon making it to the end credits, there’s no other option than to look up the film online simply to reassure myself that I have really seen what I’ve seen, and that my sense of weirdness is shared by others. I will try to describe France société anonyme but I will fail. It’s simply too weird, too scattered, too proudly anarchic for that. Consider that it opens with a naked nurse walking to a 250-year-old man in 2222, as he starts telling us about his younger years from his hospital bed. The story flashing back to 1974, we (chaotically) learn how he became a drug lord, then started fighting back against a government that suddenly wanted to legalize all drugs. This is writer-director Alain Corneau’s feature film debut, and it’s markedly different from the sober crime thrillers that filled up the rest of his filmography. France Société anonyme is intentionally, aggressively weird. It features more nudity (and glimpses of hardcore sex) than you’d expect from even a 1970s French film. It zig-zags between dark social comedy, crime thriller, science fiction, cynical political commentary, art film, filmmaking satire and plenty of points in between. (Consider that the drug lord, upon seeing his empire threatened by legalization, politically organizes addicts and launches a PR campaign based on the idea that the government will use the drugs for social control and genocide.) Try not to make sense of the result, because it’s voluntarily made to confuse, shock, mislead and challenge expectations. The scene-to-scene pacing of the film is off because it seemingly goes everywhere and anywhere, with only a few key scenes allowing a plot summary when the rest of it doesn’t always seem connected to the overall story being told. (Maybe there were as many drugs off-screen than on.)  It’s a truly confounding, weird film — the kind that doesn’t court admiration, but nonetheless feels like a treat to watch for its sheer unlikeliness. I was intrigued by France société anonyme because, well, French Science Fiction films of the 1970s are already rare enough. But I ended up staying for the wackiness of the result, even if very long stretches of the film are dull and incomprehensible. It takes all kinds of films to bring up a cinephile, and this is at the edges of it all.