More

Klaus Grunberg and Mimsy Farmer follow their bliss in More

Barbet Schroeder's More, his first feature from 1969, is a grim look at the counter culture. As with most of Schroeder's features, I found it interesting, yet ultimately unsatisfying. Mimsy Farmer stars as an American gal in France who entrances a young German. He follows her to Ibiza and after she hooks him, he becomes entangled with her other love, heroin, with tragic results.

Schroeder is an objective realist in the Preminger mode and seems attracted to protagonists who are ambivalent, such as in Reversal of Fortune and Barfly. Like Preminger, Schroeder does not judge his characters or create moral parables around their plight. He views his characters' flaws in a clear eyed fashion with little subjective feeling. His portraits of ambivalent relationships intrigue, both here and in his later work. However, he is not half the technician that Preminger was. The death of a junkie at the conclusion of More lacks the impact of, say, Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons plummeting down a canyon to meet their end in Angel Face.

Despite the presence of Nestor Almendros as cinematographer, More is haphazardly shot. Interiors are sometimes dark and indistinct. Some of this can be attributed to the scant budget, but Schroeder never became a visually arresting director. The score by Pink Floyd sounds like they are still struggling to find their way in the post Syd Barrett era.