fedor8 It was truly amazing/amusing to read some of the pretentious, wanna-be pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook some people wrote about "Themroc". Clearly, this story excited quite a few of society's misfits, losers, and Marxist misanthropes because of its anarchistic attitude. They identify with the main character because, just like him, they are too weak to take the pressure of modern life so they seek out Che Guevara, Sid Vicious, or even G.G. Allin as guiding lights, mocking anyone who is content, hard-working, or successful in this oh-so evil Capitalist world they live in. (Ayn Rand refers to those types as "moochers". She was being kind.) So naturally such viewers read everything into the movie that they wanted to read into it. I.e. that it's meant to about Western decadence, police brutality, 1968, bla bla bla. (If anything, there should be MORE police brutality, especially on May 1st.) With "Themroc", making these kinds of very personal (read: deluded) interpretations is very easy: the movie has no dialogue, at least nothing apart from various grunts and groans - which is how Leftist pumpkins sound to ME when they expose their ignorance by over-rationalizing the events in movies such as this one.Piccoli is very good as the labourer-turned-Neanderthal, in what is one of the most bizarre movies I've seen. A totally obscure little oddity that is a million times harder to find than any Godard or Truffaut. Unfortunate, because this happens to be one of the best French movies ever made. Forget all those supposedly brilliant, hilariously overrated French/Euro-trash politically-coloured "character-study" dramas; THIS film is worth your attention - unless you're squeamish, that is. There is incest, there is cannibalism, and other unsavory stuff going on. And yet, the movie is part-comedy. It is not to be taken too seriously. The visual look, that somewhat grainy 70s feel, also contributes to the quality.

unruhlee This film is hilarious. It is inspiring. It captures the absurdity of everyday life in a repressive social order, and portrays the infectious poetic revolt of one man who "goes mad" against authority in every form.It's interesting that the strategy of liberation in the film revolves around a very personal and playful attack on the architecture most immediate to our lives. This destruction and transformation of space is accompanied by a kind of sexual revolution, disrupting bourgeois family dynamics in a contagious way. Readers may recognize the resonance of these themes with the theory and agitation of the Situationist International, the revolutionary / avant-garde organization credited with sparking the revolt of May 1968 in France. Five years previous to Themroc's release, millions of people actually did occupy public spaces including universities and factories, creating "passionally superior ambiances" in many cases, armed to a significant extent with Situationist ideas, graffiti slogans from which plastered Paris.Not that seeing Themroc is any substitute for actively engaging the rigorous revolutionary theory of the S.I. (see www.bopsecrets.org). But the film is in a way a dream-like rendition of the Situationist vision of changing life. And in fact, there is a passing reference to Themroc in "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?", a film by Situationist René Vienet: when the hero of that film is confronting the "bureaucrats", some onlookers comment something to the effect that "wow, that guy must have seen Themroc."

dbdumonteil That's what John Lennon once said.Themroc is would be avant-garde,but only for these who have a short memory.Take the beginning of the movie:these herds going to work ,the hero's tiny and seedy flat,they already were in King Vidor's "the crowd" (1928).Actually Claude Faraldo contents himself with recycling the most dated clichés of the post May 68 era:down with the bosses,power to the people,kill (and eat) the cops,this is a brand new life ,opportunity knocks,make love not war,we are the good guys,the others are the villains,please get out of the new road if you can't lend a hand,and so on.Spitting on the cops was so à la mode that Faraldo could not be wrong while speaking to the intellectual post 68 elite :humble people are actually demeaned in his film.How to attract people's attention?Which form should he use? That's Faraldo's lucky break!No form at all, a formless product.So it seems that he has filmed haphazardly,then asked his editor to work in a "surrealistic " way(He was not aware that Luis Bunuel had already done that ,as far as editing is concerned- un chien andalou (1928) l'âge d'or (1930);his movies were as subversive as Faraldo's ,and at a time when it was not that much trendy.Bunuel wasn't born to follow).People who like this -and they seem to be quite a lot- should catch Jacques Doillon 's "l'an 01",which deals with the same clichés,but which is less pretentious :it could be,relatively speaking,a seventies update of Jean Renoir's "la vie est à nous" (1936).

kcool I saw this movie back in the seventies and I can't forget it.This movie rules. I must be the best film I have ever seen. We are all animals, even if we chose to think of ourselves as something more divine than a common ape. Watch this movie and open your eyes.