If the Nouvelle Vague were a group of kindergartners, then director Jacques Rozier would most likely be the class dunce. After screening a rough cut of his début feature Adieu Philippine (1962) to legendary producer Georges de Beauregard, the latter reacted by tossing the film canisters out into the street, forcing Rozier to seek the help of New Wave buddy François Truffaut to finance the film's completion. Although in the end it tanked at the box office, Adieu would wind up achieving a certain cultish notoriety. Its depiction of a young banlieusard and his fling with two girlfriends just prior to being shipped off to the Algerian War offered up a realistic, often hysterical portrait of a young French generation on the brink of change, and would set the stage for the turbulent years to come.

Throughout the rest of his haphazard career, Rozier would go on to make a few scattered features and documentaries, the most outlandish of them all being the farfetched 80's comedy Maine Océan (1986). Like a Marx brothers film shot by Jean Vigo and set to the music of Carmen Miranda, Maine Océan moves from one absurd set piece to another, accompanied by a cast of uncanny characters which includes a lawyer obsessed with semiotics (Lydia Feld), a towering Brazilian showgirl (Rosa-Maria Gomes), a duo of depressed SNCF ticket agents (Luis Rego & Bernard Menez), and a drunken sailor (Yves Afonso) whose unintelligible outbursts make Popeye look like Albert Einstein.

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