L'Enfant le Plus Terrible

He's stewed to the gills, crocked, see, and so he grabs me in his arms and he kisses me, which is normal since he is my pa, but when he starts pawin' me all over and gettin' fresh and all, and I tell him hey nunodatstuff because I know damn well what he's drivin' at, the bastard, but when I tell him no no never, like I said, he goes to the door an' locks it an' shove's the key in his pocket, and you shoulda seen the way he was rollin' his eyeballs, like in the old time flics, it was terrific.

So--in rough translation--bawls the ten-year-old heroine of Zazie dans le Metro, a new French film currently packing Paris cinema houses. While her contemporaries practiced the piano, Zazie practiced les belles four-lettres. She learned her French history ("Napoleon! That jerk gives me a pain, with his bowlegs and his corny hat"), dreamed of a career as a schoolmarm ("so I can beat the stuff out of the brats"), until she heard that teachers would soon be replaced by machines, and decided instead to be an astronaut ("so I can beat the stuff out of the Martians").

Parisian Pollyanna. A national institution since she burst on the Seine in a 1959 bestselling novel, Zazie has become almost as influential as Colette's Gigi at the height of La Belle Epoque. Critics have compared Zazie's creator--Raymond Queneau, a distinguished poet and chief reader at the Gallimard publishing house--to Flaubert, Stendhal, Hugo and Hegel. (One angry dissenter: Nobel Prize Laureate Franc,ois Mauriac.)

The reasons for Zazie's serious appeal to critics are complex. For one thing, Author Queneau, a onetime surrealist deeply concerned with language, tries to close the gap between literary and spoken speech in the Zazie novel, runs words together and sometimes employs phonetic spellings. Others see in Zazie a device of savage social satire. Says New Wave Movie Director Louis (Les Amants) Malle: "She's actually the angel come to announce the destruction of Babylon." Still others have compared her to everyone from Joan of Arc (defending popular virtues against monarchists with Napoleonic delusions) to Lolita. In fact, Zazie is less of a Lolita than a Parisian Pollyanna, for she is a warmhearted fille, completely uninvolved in the sordid sex life that she is always talking about.

Everybody's Advice. Whatever else the horrendous hoyden may be, she is a hot movie property, originally bought by Bardot Producer Raoul J. Levy for a record-breaking $57,000. When he decided that the story was too hot to shoot, after all, he sold it to Malle, who explains: "What encouraged me the most was that everybody advised me against it." His solution: rendering the novelist's gush of gutter talk through Sennett-like changes of pace, face and place--with virtually a sight-gag per frame. The result: a remarkably faithful translation of the book that the Paris Express summed up as "90 minutes of cinematographic paroxysm."

In search of his star, Director Malle interviewed hundreds before settling on Catherine Demongeot, now 10, a Parisian house painter's daughter who, as film legend naturally had it, was the only applicant to come without her mother and by subway. Somehow, she learned her scatological dialogue and emerged from the unusually rich experience unscathed--except for the fact that she fell in love with her director.

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