Les Arpenteurs (1972)
Directed by Michel Soutter
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Synopsis by Clarke Fountain
This black-and-white Swiss feature whimsically recaptures elements of the "theater of the absurd" of Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and so on. One of the hallmarks of Theater of the Absurd is that outrageous situations are endured by characters in a completely serious, deadpan manner. The backbone story concerns a lazy surveyor, thwarted by two women whose houses he is surveying for destruction to make way for a park. One of the women blithely continues her teaching business, apparently unconcerned about her house's imminent destruction. In another realm of the story, two men meet, and one gives the other his hat. The hat-giver asks the other to give his fiancé a gift. The hat recipient mistakenly gives the gift to another girl entirely, and makes love to her.
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Keywords
life-choices, slice-of-life, survey