Melvin Van Peebles – La permission AKA The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1967)
A black American soldier is demoted for fraternizing with a white girl in France.
Letterboxd review
Added by Criterion 16 Jun 2021
Melvin Van Peebles’s edgy, angsty, romantic first feature could never have been made in America. Unable to break into segregated Hollywood, Van Peebles decamped to France, taught himself the language, and wrote a number of books in French, one of which, La permission, would become the stylistically innovative The Story of a Three Day Pass. Turner (Harry Baird), an African American soldier stationed in France, is granted a promotion and a three-day leave from base by his casually racist commanding officer and heads to Paris, where he finds whirlwind romance with a white woman (Nicole Berger)—but what happens to their love when his furlough is over? Channeling the brash exuberance of the French New Wave, Van Peebles creates an exploration of the psychology of an interracial relationship as well as a commentary on France’s contradictory attitudes about race that is playful, sarcastic, and stingingly subversive by turns, and that laid the foundation for the scorched-earth cinematic revolution he would let loose just a few years later.
La.permission.AKA.The.Story.of.a.Three.Day.Pass.1967.576p.BluRay.AC3.x264.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1 h 28 min
Size: 2.25 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 960x576
Aspect ratio: 5:3
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 3 451 kb/s
BPP: 0.260
Audio
#1: Multiple languages 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (English & French)
Language:English, French
Subtitles:English
