Too Early, Too Late Film Difficulty Ranking: 5
Too Early, Too Late isn’t your typical documentary. Instead of following a person, animal, or political movement, it documents the landscape through a series of long sweeping shots of fields, land, and people. If you’re a people watcher, or someone who likes to sit on a park bench and contemplate the view, you’ll enjoy Too Early, Too Late. It requires patience, an open mind, and some open ears.
From: France, Egypt, Europe, Africa
Watch: YouTube, Rent on Amazon
Next: Playtime, Peace, Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
The Breakdown
Too Early, Too Late starts with a car driving around a roundabout. It probably circles around the roundabout 20 times, letting you see cars entering and leaving the road and the buildings the car we’re in drives past. Whilst we’re circling around some location in Paris, a narrator reads a letter written by Engels describing the impoverished state of French peasants.
After 10-15 minutes, the film cuts from the endless circling of the city roundabout to rural France. It’s here that we meet the first of the two main characters in this film: the French countryside.
The French landscape is empty and desolate, but green and full of sounds of nature: birds chirping, the wind, and tractors motoring by. It’s a place where there is too much space and a lot of green land. A place where the land isn’t being maximized; the emptiness of the shots suggest that the potential of French farms have been forgotten by the populous French city from the opening scene.
In contrast, the Egyptian landscape in the second part of the film is vibrant. It always contains human life. Even though there’s less greenery, there are busy factories and farmers tilling fields along the Nile. It shows a way of life that the French landscape has lost – working class people working the land or working manufacturing jobs in factories.
The End of the Working Class
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet contrast the two countries to show us the difference between the empty French and lively Egyptian countryside. The French landscape has lost it’s inhabitants and workers as the French economy has modernized, whilst Egypt’s developing landscape still provides work and livelihood for it’s inhabitants. However, the final shot of the film hints that Egypt’s countryside will follow the French countryside’s fate.
Throughout the entire film, Straub and Huillet use long horizontal shots which slowly sweep across the landscape from right to left. The shots give us a complete 360 panorama of the landscape. It’s a complete, unbiased documentation of the landscape. However, the final shot of the film breaks the horizontal camera movement of the rest of the film by tracking two tall buildings under construction from top to bottom.
They’re the only objects that require a top to bottom tracking shot to capture their complete height. They tower over the nature and countryside featured in the rest of the film. They’re symbols of the arrival of modernity and tertiary sector service jobs at the expense of primary and secondary sector jobs (in extraction of raw materials and manufacturing). They’re also a warning sign of the issues a developing economy gains as it modernizes: unemployment, class struggle, and calls for revolution.
What to Watch Next
For another film that suppresses dialogue to emphasize the setting, check out Jacques Tati’s Playtime. As written by Francois Truffant, Playtime is “a film that comes from another planet, where they make films differently”.
Or if you want to watch more observational documentary, check out some of Kazuhiro Soda’s work, starting at Peace or Campaign. You could also check out the diary documentary films made by Jonas Mekas, starting with his brilliant stream of consciousness flow in Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania.
Or if you want to keep challenging yourself with more unique films, check out Fausto from Mexico, Serpentarius from Angola, or Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You from Lesotho.
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