Too Early/Too Late

So slow, no story to it, personally I hated this 104 minute waste of time. No idea why this is on 1001.

I don't know why this film is part of 1100 movies you should see before you die. I mean, I respect the movie critics who wrote the book, but in my eyes it was just waste of time. I was searching for 21 years to find this picture: and now I saw it it was this??! I mean, it's not that I'm against the avant garde: Bela Tarr's "Satantango" was pure genius according to me; but I just didn't like this film. If its message would be to know people are poor I would accept it, while understanding that thru could have made ghjd statement in a few minutes instead of 104.

Perhaps the thing that most amazes me about Huillet & Straub's films is how effortlessly cinematic they remain while being such cerebral works. The landscapes that constitute this film's visual language are among the greatest I've ever experienced in any film, conveying a sense of almost transcendent wonder at the landscapes of France and, even more so, Egypt. It is a vision informed by Bresson, Antonioni, Ozu and pregnant with the aesthetics of Kiarastami and Wenders. That this visual wonder does not overwhelm the work's ideas- informed by Engles's meditations of the premature birth of socialist radicalism during the French Revolution, and the frustrations of Egyptian communists as to the "misdirection" of the masses' activism (including what was, to me, an unfortunate ultra-leftist critique of Nasser)- constitutes proof that cinema can not only be philosophical, but actually practice philosophy.

I did not go to film school so cannot speak to the technical side of this movie, although people seem to agree that is quite solid.

So, I'm left to judge the film by the way they tell their story. When it comes to Too Early / Too Late I think there seems to be a lot of space left open for interpretation and contemplation. Much like a therapist whose comfort with awkward silence causes the patient to wrestle with their own thoughts,Straub and Huillet invite us to meditate on the passing of time and the legacy of rebellions.

Growing up reading about various rebellions or overthrown governments I had rarely given thought to the physicality of the spaces these impoverished workers lived in and dreamed to improve. This is what the film does well.

Where I find it lacking is that a fair amount of the film is boring. Too much contemplation and meditation. The poems on rebellion spoken over the landscapes they reference is a cool idea for a project and at times it's very thought-provoking. In between those moments, however, there's just too much dead air with 10-min shots of country roads.

Featuring a justly infamous, even startling opening sequence with a tilted camera pointed out the window of a moving car that keeps driving and driving around a famous traffic circle (forget the name) in Paris for 10 odd minute - a continual 360 that never catches a glimpse of its axis, too perfect - TOO EARLY, TOO LATE is a singular meditation and extended visual metaphor on the theme of revolution (get it??) shot in a variety of locations and cities with a Marxist voice-over reading from famous selections on the subject. Quite unlike anything else you'll see and while obviously not what you'd call entertainment, some of the shooting once you get outside the city is breathtakingly beautiful. Are they trying to implicate us in this collective indifference to social ills by growing absorbed in the natural beauty of the surroundings? I'm not sure, but certainly Straub/Huillet's subtle avant-garde combo filmwork is among the most underappreciated in German and, indeed, international cinema.