Rene Clement is a semi well known French director, having made such films as Is Paris Burning and Forbidden Games. He has won 15 awards according to IMDb, and was prolific in the 40 years he was active in cinema. He was previously mentioned on this blog with The Deadly Trap. Every director has to have a final project, a last film ever, and Wanted: Babysitter was the last film he ever made.
Wanted is a black and white drama "thriller" which was, to cut it short a bit, a fucking chore to get through. This starts and I'm immediately hooked by tons of unnecessary nudity and weirdness, but it slows down very quick, and then ponders on. The primary feel of this movie was a unevenness, balancing out long scenes with completely expressionless actors, to brutal violence and sexuality. However, it's the expressionless nothing that ends up winning out, and the movie was not that great.
Maria Schneider plays Michelle, a babysitter to little kid Boots. Vic, the kidnapper, is going to hold Boots hostage for a bunch of money because the boys father owns a successful store and has cash I guess. There's plenty of scenes of Boots and Michelle together, in a house where they're kept hostage, talking and thinking about escape. Eventually, they get a note tied to a dog and this gets the kidnapper to kill the dogs owner, sort of outing the operation and getting the cops involved.
This movie was: slow, hard to follow, had very bland acting, and was confusingly shot and edited as well. Honestly, I couldn't tell you about half of these plot points in detail, and I completely lost track of what happened as the end finally came. This one is almost two hours long, and oh boy does it feel like it.
There are some mildly interesting moments that happen, and Boots and Michelle are made to be intelligent, which is nice, but fuuuuck, this movie kills all those good parts with lots and lots and lots of hard to follow, unintelligible choices. Also, for 1975 this movie looks godawful. Did they shoot this on like, vintage 1940's filmstock? The film looks horrible! What's more, IMDb claims this is in color! It is most definitely not in color on my boxset!? Yes, two minutes worth of research shows this was indeed in color....so I can't take that into account with my review. Holy shit, this boxset fucking sucks! Give me the color version!!!! I don't hate black and white but damn!
They were trying to capitalize on the recent success of actress Maria Schneider, only a couple years away from Last Tango in Paris and same year as The Passenger. But her role in this is so completely wooden and unexplained that it only makes one wonder why she was in any movies, ever. They tried desperately to market this, just look at these different posters:
I mean, the movie on the left is a straightup slasher flick poster. Right is a druggie nudie exploitation. And then this actual movie is neither! They really led audiences astray here. I give it 1.5, mostly for the interesting parts, and a few nude scenes.
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