Mister Freedom

The colossal Mr Freedom (Abbey) wears baseball gear, feverishly decorated - like so much else in this heavy-handed romp - with stars, stripes, red, white and blue. His mission is to rid France of America's ideological enemies, represented by Red-China-Man (a smoke-breathing yellow-tailed monster) and Moujik-Man (Noiret in a rather fetching inflated red costume). But Freedom overplays his hand, and blows up the whole country along with himself. Klein shows a parallel lack of restraint, going all out to slay American imperialism with sledgehammer irony and a comic strip style which soon becomes tiresome. Isolated things remain among the debris: a shot of a smiling girl with two boiled eggs and a strip of bacon on her chest in a heady montage on the delights of American life; the sight of Christ silencing the Virgin Mary with 'Mom, please!'; and of course Delphine Seyrig as a drum majorette/whore double agent.