"Bonnie and Clyde", portrait of an obsession.

Lines of the plot.

Bonnie. A caged bird.

But birds are made to fly.

Faye Dunaway, Bonnie, appears semi-naked during the first few minutes of the film.
Something completely transgressive and unusual in the cinema of that era.

He watches from the window as a young man tries to steal his mother’s car.
Magnetized by the desire to meet the thief, she rushes down the stairs of her house and Boom! There’s the charismatic Clyde, embodied byWarren Beatty.

Clyde invites her to have a drink in town. He suspects that Bonnie works as a waitress. And tells him about his recent past in prison for assault with weapons.

Between laughs and in secret, Clyde shows the gun to Bonnie, who caresses her ecstatically.

I don’t think you dare use your weapon.

Clyde steals the shop in front of them without hesitation. He leaves with several dollars in his hand and a hail of gunfire.

After the robbery, they run away together in a stolen car.
Bonnie covers him with kisses, absolutely in love.

However, she is disappointed by Clyde’s response.

I’m not a good lover. It’s nothing personal against you, it’s that I never find the advantage of it.
There is nothing wrong with me nor do I like men.

Bonnie feels rejected, but he explains that sex can be had with anyone, at any time. It’s nothing special.
However, what Clyde can offer is unique and priceless: an anarchic, glamorous and criminal life. Outside the law.
Absolutely anti-system.
Stained with blows of violence, glory and fame.
She still hesitates.

Bonnie, surprised, asks:

When did you come up with all this?

When I saw you, reply Clyde absolutely in love…

Now yes, Bonnie sees in this life proposed by Clyde, the opportunity to finally spread his wings, and fly.

After a couple of failed attempts to rob, but with a new car in their possession, they take refuge in an abandoned house.
Clyde detects an intruder and points his gun at him.
This is the previous owner, to whom the bank took this house. From the car, his family watches the situation evolve.
Bonnie is very sad, feeling the injustice of the system like a dagger stuck in her heart.
Clyde shoots the bank sign on the property and then offers the gun to the man, who also fires it, leaving the sign full of holes.

Everyone feels a little better.

The criminal career has begun, with a deep bloody, romantic and anti-system seal.
As he says goodbye to the previous owner of the house and his family, as a greeting card, Clyde states:

She’s the miss Bonnie Parker, I’m Clyde Barrow, we rob banks.

Technical data and cultural impact
Set during the Great Depression, written by Robert Benton, David Newman, Robert Towne, with collaboration in this groundbreaking line by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.
Inspired by the famous bank robbers whose crimes took place between 1932 and 1934.
This first production by Warren Beatty, released in 1967, navigates between comedy and drama, to the rhythm of the exceptional soundtrack by Charles Strouse.
Directed by Arthur Penn who stands out for inserting moments of natural light.

Like Bonnie running across the country with Clyde chasing her.

Just a year earlier, in 1966, Hollywood films could not portray the police force as antagonists, nor recreate themselves in blood. Two factors that attracted the public to see Bonnie and Clyde in mass.
Bonnie And Clyde assumes an intellectual autonomy from the public, does not tell you what to think or feel.
This seduced the youth, who had not been to the cinema for years, focusing on other more subversive artistic expressions against the government. But this time, the bad guys are the cops and the banks.

The influence of the French Nouvelle Vague brushes its narrative and visual style.

They’re young! They’re in love! And they kill people! The most exciting gangster film ever shot.

Bonnie and Clyde UK promotional phrase, already a cultural and social phenomenon.

Bonnie and Clyde aroused a collective euphoria by deliberately associating with the outcasts, as we can see in Taxi Driver or Midnight Cowboy. The exploration and staging of this type of transformative violence, where aggression is the only method to change the system, takes the cited films to another level, turning them into classicism.

Reference text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_and_Clyde_(film)

Personal appreciations

Explicit violence hits commercial cinema with Bonnie and Clyde.
A violent and anarchic artistic proposal, as well as dreamlike, daring, poetic and romantic.
In the freshness of a fledgling love in difficult times, we can see Bonnie abandon the predictable passive role that is imposed on women. It’s a breath of fresh air to see her take the bull by the horns.
Choosing and embracing this new path with boldness, cheek and fidelity to your ideals is the only possible option of realization, even if you know that your life will be as short as the flapping of a butterfly.
In this new active female construction, poetry grows and emanates from the film, which will no doubt raise an infinite number of questions for you and me.
Clyde’s sexual impotence is not a minor fact in this stormy, violent and obsessive love, which also expresses itself in the adrenaline that exhales the risk of a shared death.
And it’s wonderful and tender at the same time, to watch and feel them stop being just Bonnie Parker or Clyde Barrow, to give life to the legendary couple of outlaw lovers Bonnie and Clyde.

A magnificent proposal that invites, as Bonnie from her window, to enter into a story that will not leave us unscathed.

I leave you the beauty of discovering the rest of this wonderful portrait of an obsession that plays this singular couple of outlaw lovers.

My first time with Bonnie and Clyde

I was in the middle of Buenos Aires, my date had left me standing, and I didn’t know what to do with my time and life that August afternoon.
I made a very crazy decision for that time: to go into the cinema alone.
I was seduced by the poster with that hot couple that emanated complicity and joy, something I did not have at the time.
The cinema room was full. My emotions, a roller coaster. I could go from laughter to crying in seconds, and hear in the darkness, among whispers, echoes of what was going through my interior.
It made me feel like blood could run in crazy cataracts through my veins, cry to death, and be born again. And safe.
That afternoon, I left the cinema and was somehow complicit in the crowd. Because Bonnie and Clyde achieve that, you stop being one to merge with those who, like you, are carried away by passion, without measuring the consequences.

🎬For these reasons, there is a before and after Bonnie and Clyde.

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🍿The movie is available on YouTube,

Apple TV,

and other platforms. Not to be missed!