Available to rent for $7.99
May 21 - June 25
Directed by Melvin Van Peebles
1968, USA, 87 min
New 4K Restoration
This title is available to rent via Cinematheque at Home for $7.99. This is not only an opportunity for our patrons to see new cinema, but is an important way that they can continue to support independent film during this pandemic with 50% of all sales supporting our theatre.
Melvin Van Peebles’s edgy, angsty, romantic first feature could never have been made in America. Unable to break into a segregated Hollywood, Van Peebles decamped to France, taught himself the language, and wrote a number of books in French, one of which, La permission, would become his stylistically innovative feature debut. Turner (Harry Baird), an African American soldier stationed in France, is granted a promotion and a three-day leave from base by his casually racist commanding officer and heads to Paris, where he finds whirlwind romance with a white woman (Nicole Berger). Channeling the brash exuberance of the French New Wave, Van Peebles creates an exploration of the psychology of an interracial relationship as well as a commentary on France’s contradictory attitudes about race that is playful, sarcastic, and stingingly subversive by turns, and that laid the foundation for the scorched-earth cinematic revolution he would unleash just a few years later with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.
*Winner Best Film at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
