Moments

Land of Milk and Honey(French: Pays de cocagne) is a 1971 French documentary film directed bt Pierre Étaix. It is about the state of the French society in the wake of the May 1968 events. The film was released in France on 24 February 1971.

Pierre Etaix’s most radical film, and perhaps unsurprisingly the one that effectively ended his career in cinema, Land of Milk and Honey is a fascinating investigative documentary about post–May ’68 French society.

In it, Etaix trains his discerning eye on idle summer vacationers, but the film has bigger fish to fry, asking pertinent questions about the sexualization of culture, class and gender inequality, media and advertising, and even architecture.

Review:

Etaix's fifth and last feature is a documentary. In the summer of 1968, Etaix took his camera across France to interview a variety of people. With thousands of hours of footage, he creates a document of the times, juxtaposing the images he caught with the interviews he recorded. More often than not, the interviews have nothing specifically to do with the images, but instead serve as humorous content on them.

This is more than a bit unfocused and it probably would have worked better as a short. It's only 76 minutes long, but it feels a lot longer. Still, there's a lot of value here, and the images themselves are excellent. It's definitely Etaix's least substantial and interesting picture (the most notable element is the little comic sketch Etaix does right at the beginning), but it's worth a look