Monday 8 November 2010

Breaking Away (1979)

All the kids in my street worshipped this film, and we never seemed to tire of it, even though we’d all sometimes watch it together three or four times in the same week. It chokes me up even now just thinking about it.

Mercifully free of the psychopathology that seems to infect most ‘70’s cinema, it blended a tender portrait of the drift of adolescence with a clear view of the under-examined American class system. Anyway I’m not going to subject it to a long exposition, because it doesn’t need one.

It’s magic. Pure and simple.

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