5: Too Early, Too Late (a.k.a. Too Soon, Too Late, a.k.a. Zu Fruh, Zu Spat – Original German title, a.k.a. Trop Tôt, Trop Tard – Original French title, a.k.a. Troppo Presto, Troppo Tardi – Original Italian title)

            How strange it is that two of the most difficult movies to see in the 1001 canon are “landscape films.”  With Deseret (1995; #10), Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s Too Early, Too Late (1981) is notorious amongst followers of the list for being the final elusive title for many apostles.  I noted in my review of Deseret that I believed it to be more of a “video essay” than a film.  I stand by that claim, but must admit that viewing Too Early, Too Late has caused me to reevaluate it.  I see now that that term connotes a boredom that my previous review does not describe.  But where I felt Deseret to be transcendent of the sum of its parts, I found Huillet and Straub’s film to be weighty and dull; dragged down by a not-so-subtle subtext regarding social revolution.

            After a dizzying opening shot, the film’s preliminary section consists of lengthy pans of modern provincial France, complemented by Huillet’s voiceover reading of a late-eighteenth century letter noting the impoverished state of the rural countryside under Louis XVI.  Additional verbal text is drawn from the same period’s “Notebook of Grievances,” compiled by village mayors in 1789 as a response to proposed taxation that would surely cripple the mostly agrarian economy.  The monologue overtly questions whether the peasant revolt began too early, but perhaps succeeded too late to have been truly beneficial.          

           This sentiment is heavily reinforced by the film’s lengthier second section, which shifts locales to modern Egypt, where the Neguib-lead revolution of the 1950s resulted in the expulsion of British presence.  Here the voiceover text, read by Mahmoud Hussein, is a work of Karl Marx.  The visuals in this second section are much more densely populated than their earlier counterparts, and the message is more direct when the camera is placed outside of a Cairo factory during a shift change.  Obviously this image invokes the similar early work by the Lumière brothers, and seems to insinuate the consistency of Marx’ message from the late 19^th to the latter half of the 20^th century.

            Apart from this shot, which is in and of itself difficult, as it lasts for almost ten minutes, I found little in Too Early, Too Late to capture my attention.  I falls low on my “watchability” scale.  However, much like Wavelength (1967; #129) there’s something in its innate “Filmness” that can’t be denied.  Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum (whose work I usually enjoy, but whose opinions I don’t always agree with), who composed the write-up on the film for the 1001 text, seems to put his finger on this elusive element in his essay on the film that’s posted to his website. 

He astutely notes that filmmaking is about decisions, and that Too Early, Too Late, with its implicating title, effectively conveys the power of these decisions to dictate our reactions.  Interestingly enough, though Rosenbaum put the film on his 1982 ballot for the Sight and Sound poll, he admits in the essay that he can’t quite capture the film in his prose.  Perhaps that illustrates the elusiveness of this picture, and that enough might make it worth your time.  It’s voiceovers were recorded, with the same readers, in German, French, English, and Italian, but versions hit the net in sections more often than in their entirety.  If you came across the whole thing, watch it when you find it.  It may not be posted for long.

Language: English (German, French, and Italian versions available)

Runtime: 105 Minutes

Grade: 1 Hat Off