Being There
Pleasure can be a form of dissidence, as shown by this cycle, opening up this new year with a playful and impertinent philosophical tone. The modern heirs of Diogenes, the tramp Boudu and the punks of Not Dead dynamite the bourgeois order or the consumer society. Very Happy Alexander and The Big Lebowski make a few enemies by establishing the pleasures of laziness as an art of living. Children rebel against their school's authority figures in the libertarian Zero for Conduct, while Ferris Bueller prefers to play hooky to discover the world in a different way. In Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude, life becomes a marvelous game of defying convention and death, while Mr. Chance in Being There becomes a political oracle by simply explaining how to cultivate his garden. The final word goes to the decadent intellectuals of The Decline of the American Empire and their dizzying introspection on the exhausting quest for happiness.
Chance is a kind and naive man who has spent his whole life working in the garden of a wealthy family. When his employer dies, he's left on his own in the outside world. His simplicity and benevolent attitude bring him into contact with influential people, propelling him, despite himself, into the higher spheres of power.
Hal Ashby
Hal Ashby is an American director, editor, actor and producer. He began working in Hollywood in the 1950s as an employee and then assistant editor for Universal Studios, notably on films by William Wyler, George Stevens and Franklin Schaffner. During the 1960s, Ashby became an editor for Tony Richardson and especially for Norman Jewison with whom he worked for the first time in 1965 as an editor on the film The Cincinnati Kid. His collaboration with Jewison earned Ashby an Oscar nomination for Best Editing for The Russians Are Coming, before winning the trophy the following year for In the Heat of the Night. Ashby's films are considered landmark works of American cinema of the 1970s and his film Harold and Maude has achieved cult film status over the years.
