Révélateur, Le (1968) review

One of Garrel's first films - he directed it when he was only twenty - has some of the trappings of a very artsy student film, but benefits from its stark black and white photography (at least in the copy I have, the high contrast removes a good deal of gray and sometimes the actors' faces ... although it may just be a bad print) and several extremely clever camera set-ups. A little symbolism goes a long way, and this seems to be nothing but symbols and metaphors (the boy walking through the tunnel to see his mother represents birth, the boy being taken away from his parents in a car represents abandonment and so on), and the exact purpose of the picture is never made clear (the family keeps running from something unseen and unknown - an existential dilemma?).