Cinema Year '25: July Discoveries

Maine-Ocean Express / The Naked Gun / Three Resurrected Drunkards

Welcome back to Cinema Year ‘25, a monthly review supplement. June’s discoveries took us from France’s West coast, to the frontlines of Police Squad, to an Ōshima pop oddity. Words by Ben Flanagan, Blaise Radley, and Esmé Holden.

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Maine-Ocean Express (Jaques Rozier, 1986, France)

Ciné Lumière’s brief but necessary Jacques Rozier retrospective (of his five features they screened three) illuminated a key member of the French New Wave. Wrongly, I had assumed he created sprightly but dated expressions of French youth. While they do broadly sit under the banner of bildungsroman, these films including Adieu Philippine (1962) and Du côté d'Orouët (1973) have an improvisational, shaggy-dog mentality, as though thrown together on the fly using the first objects and ideas that come to mind.

My favourite, Maine-Ocean Express, is a summer’s tale. Though the train of its title only appears briefly, the film moves as though on tracks, constantly collecting and dropping off characters, situations, feelings. A Brazilian dancer is hassled on the train from Paris to the coast near Nantes by two jobsworth ticket inspectors. After her friend leaps in to help, the ticket inspector's bigotry gives way to desire. Somehow, the four end up on a voyage to a nearby island together.

Populated by salty sea dogs, cynical showmen, and all manner of vehicles, Rozier lets scenes play out in immaculate long takes that form the visual elements into ever evolving shapes. Bursting with revelation, it feels like a Howard Hawks film, specifically Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) in how its extended scenes become about their own making. This is most present in a gorgeous set piece in which the cast sit around, lazily rehearsing a performance of Chico Buarque de Holanda’s Samba tune ‘Meu Caro Amigo’. But as with all summer holidays, bliss gives way to anxiety, in a tense ending. You just gotta catch that train. BF

The Naked Gun (Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, 1988, USA)

I’m cheating a little in calling The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! a discovery, but cut me some slack here—the last time I saw Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) warble through ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ I was still wearing school uniforms. Besides, isn’t it a cinephilic obligation to revisit the past whenever it’s challenged or aggrandised by a new iteration? Decry IP ransacking as we might, it’s nice to hang out with some old buddies (including you-know-who), even if only to see how much everyone’s changed.

What’s most striking about the ZAZ original when viewed following Akiva Schaffer’s 2025 reboot is its lived-in texture. Where Schaffer chases down the next opening for a gag with such an intensity (and, admittedly, with a good amount of success) that the surrounding dialogue lands as perfunctory, ZAZ make efforts to ground their rampant absurdity in a recognisable emotion, if not reality. For a film with a reputation as a machine gun fire of innuendos and pratfalls, the scenes between Drebin and his romantic flame Jane (Priscilla Presley) feel surprisingly tender.

That’s not to say Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson lack a similar spark—far from it. As lusty airhead Frank Drebin Jr and femme fatale Beth Davenport, their repartee carries some of the reboot’s stronger comedic sequences (buoyed, no doubt, by the pair’s in-person romantic coupling). But their relationship never transcends its noir pastiche to register as more than set up for the next gag, something ZAZ manage with a light touch amongst the barrage of double entendres. No messing with the GOATs. BR

Three Resurrected Drunkards (Nagias Ōshima, 1968, Japan)

I can only assume that you’ve been looking for a take on the Beatles movies, specifically A Hard Day’s Night (1964), from one of the harshest, most political voices of the Japanese New Wave, right? Well, sitting amongst many of his best film’s—1968’s Death By Hanging, 1969’s Boy & 1970’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film—Nagisa Ōshima’s Three Resurrected Drunkards (1968) comes to answer your call.

It’s based on a song by The Folk Crusaders, who also act as the three leads, playing, if not versions of themselves, then totems, credited as the big one, the small one and the smaller one. They bumble and frolic through a movie that isn’t twisted by their antics, as is the case for those four lads from Liverpool, but one that contorts around them in increasingly complex and confusing ways.

Nominally, the plot starts with three idiot boys having their clothes replaced with Korean military uniforms as they’re out swimming. The culprits are two soldiers who want to kill them and plant their bodies as their own, then assuming their identities. Well, they actually only need two bodies, but while they’re at it, they might as well make a third. When the boys wake up, we see where this dream ended, but where it began is much less clear.

And then the film starts over again. We see the first few scenes play out again in full, over multiple minutes in which I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. And then they wake up again, at a point that would basically negate the whole movie if the characters, both the boys and the Koreans, didn’t seem to retain so much information across these wake ups and resets. As if the line between the waking and dreaming world were soft and porous.

All of this, alongside a rhythm of moment that feels consistently out of step, makes the film feel, if not exactly sloppy, then obscure in intention; in how much of this effect is intended and what the intention of this effect is. Without the tendrils of auteurism—this is hardly the first Ōshima to feel this way—it would be easy to let Three Resurrected Drunkards drift into the category of oddities: something to be looked at with a slight, ironic remove. But there is a lot of pleasure to be had in trying to keep up with its constant wrong-footing pace. There is clarity in feeling newly lost every few minutes.

And it all feels justified in the final sequence, shot through a train window with an outside constantly moving but never changing, which feels so stunningly assured and searingly purposeful. It’s Ōshima’s final feint, a pivot to total seriousness and political convictions, which could only be built on ground so insecure. It’s something a little beyond the purview of the Liverpudleans. EH