Nothing in Malle's filmography, or in the French New Wave in general, could prep you for the departure that Zazie dans le Metro (1960) represents – it's like a film from Mars, a very *French* Mars. It bears no discernible relation to his previous two features (nor the pioneering documentary made with and about Jacques Cousteau in 1956, The Silent World), and amid the Wave's DIY burst of indie creativity it seems ludicrously out of place. Shot in effervescent color while the movement's other films were indelibly black-&-white, and seemingly employing the entirety of a caught-in-amber 1960 Paris, Malle's movie is an anarchist farce, baldly, bravely approximating the worldview of its titular heroine, a spritely, irreverent, vandalizing brat (an eleven-year-old tomboy named Catherine Demongeot) as she visits her uncle (Philippe Noiret) in Paris while her mother departs for a romantic weekend.

Zazie's destructive, carefree asocial escapades make up what passes for a plot; her uncle and an identity-swapping policeman (Vittorio Caprioli) pursue her across the city (or sometimes forget to, overwhelmed as they occasionally are with romantic distractions), as she, a country girl, is determined to ride the Metro trains whether they're striking or not. Based on an impish novel by Raymond Queneau, Malle's film uses the whimsical semi-story as license to break the bank in terms of absurdist schtick and high-flying nonsense. Virtually no old-school gag-trick is left out: silent-comedy fast motion, gobbledygook language play (rather impressively translated into pidgin English in the newly restored subtitles), in-camera sleight-of-hand, splats of comic-book animation, musical impromptus, non sequitur cutaways, social satire, surrealistic touches (random shoes sold at a market play music when Zazie picks them up), even a climactic food fight-slash-set-demolition. It's a frenetic chaos, often evoking the Keystone Kops.

The odd thing about Zazie is that it is rarely funny –