Hu-Man
Entry updated 3 May 2024. Tagged: Film.
French film (1975). Romantique Films, Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française, Institut national de l'audiovisuel, Filmologies. Directed by Jérôme Laperrousaz. Written by Jérôme Laperrousaz, André Roullan and Guillaume Laperrousaz, with the collaboration of Francis Guilbert. Cast includes Jeanne Moreau, Terence Stamp, Agnès Stevenin and Frederik von Pallandt. 105 minutes. Colour.
Television company executives believe they can make the highest-rated show of all time by filming Time Travel. Their plan is to place a human being in genuine danger and store the "psychic energy" resulting from the public's anxiety, which will create the huge amounts of energy needed to send a person to the past or future. Famous actor Terence (Stamp), who has become a recluse since the suicide of his wife, agrees to take part. He is warned that if he does not return to the exact time and place he left he could die in the attempt. The first part of the project seems to be a success, as enough energy is created, but Terence's girlfriend, believing he has actually died, kills herself. Terence runs away in fury, but is treated as a fugitive and caught. He then gives in and enters the "Time Zone", where he travels to the future. Here he finds we have destroyed the world he knew, and he is left on a lifeless, lava-filled shore. At first he enjoys the solitude, but is overwhelmed by his memories and resolves to return to a time before his wife's death. The ending is ambiguous.
This film, far from a conventional Time Travel story, is perhaps surprisingly obscure given the eminence of the cast (though Jeanne Moreau is totally wasted), but it is modish and incoherent, inviting unflattering comparisons with Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968). The set pieces are unnecessarily protracted and there are numerous shots of Stamp gazing moodily into the distance or riding a motorbike to pad it out further. The uncertain tone extends to the soundtrack, which jumps from some pretty good electronic ambience (by Boris Vian) to jazz and particularly awful blues rock. The "Time Zone" is nothing more than a plastic dome in a field, and there is little hint of media Satire despite the plot. There is one great sequence with Stamp wandering a wasteland in the future, with a wailing electronically modified voice making his thoughts audible, that suggest the filmmakers may have assumed many of the film's viewers would be on drugs. [CWa]
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