Dennis Hopper’s best film is also the most misunderstood: Out of the Blue (released in France in 1981 under the hideous title Boyish), which resurfaces in new copy in a beautiful DVD / BluRay combo published by Potemkine. It is a miraculous film that could not have existed, a desperate gesture torn from the circumstances. At the end of 1979, it has been ten years since Hopper touched a camera, passed in the blink of an eye from the monster success ofEasy rider (1969) to the suicide of The Last Movie (1970), or a leading figure in Hollywood’s outcast counterculture.
Ten years of acting here and there, until he then found himself on the set of a small Canadian production in disarray, in the vicinity of Vancouver, which he resumed at a moment’s notice. In the space of a few adjustments, Hopper transforms what was shaping up to be uplifting social fiction into a fierce scorch over declassified America. The survivor understands above all that he must bet everything on the personality of his main performer, the brilliant Linda Manz, 18, who came out with a halo of a prodigious performance in The Harvests of the Sky (1978), by Terrence Malick.
Film diverted on the fly, Out of the Blue focuses on the figure of Cindy (Linda Manz), who calls herself “Cebe”, insubordinate teenager, feverish, runaway, always on the go, middle finger high erect, who swears by punk and does not recognize herself as models than in Elvis Presley, Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. It would be necessary to add one more, of which the portrait in rebel way Brando adorns his night table: his father Don (Dennis Hopper), former truck driver imprisoned for having dark on a school bus full of toddlers. His release from prison sounds the reminder of an impossible family life between him, worn on the bottle, and Kathy (Sharon Farrell), heroin addict mother, remnants of a generation whose libertarian impulse crashed on the wall of the decade. The film captures the switch between the hippie generation and its enraged punk offspring, in which a change of air of time is also played out, a historic transition between the end of 1970 and the beginning of 1980, a threshold beyond which any future ceases to be conceivable. .
A deep decay
Any era is gauged by the degree of freedom it makes possible. Out of the Blue describes this shift from one era to another as a violent backlash: in the face of economic and social pressures, freedom can no longer be experienced except in a marginal, convulsive, desperate way. It is, in the first part, the rage manifested by the character of Cebe, whom the film accompanies on its lines of flight, in its perpetual swerves, climbing on the back of a van to reach Vancouver, wandering the streets, witnessing a punk concert.
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