Review of Too Early, Too Late (1981)
Seen in 2024.
I saw a 2K restoration with English-language “narration” at Cinemateket.
Two people with heavy accents read brief excerpts from communist propaganda at irregular intervals, to 16mm colour footage of the places mentioned, in France and Egypt, with intradiegetic sound. Near the end, there’s some silent greyscale footage from earlier Egyptian unrest and regime change.
A demonstratively boring documentary. The landscape photography is mildly aesthetic and mildly informative, but so uneventful that it seems designed to induce a state of day dreaming, not to make you think about the quoted words of Friedrich Engels and Mahmoud Hussein, or the general idea of revolutions happening too early and succeeding too late, or any of the specifics: The work of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the traces of both Islam and pagan religion in the Egyptian countryside, etc. Making a feature film this atelic and this unwilling to claim your attention provides a useful sense of perspective on commercial cinema.