Harold and Maude 4K 1971

Harold has everything except his own desires. Youth, wealth, and a caring—yes, in her own way—mother. But he finds joy in his own death, tirelessly staging suicide attempts, selfishly hoping to witness the grief of his loved ones at his sudden demise. Her son’s ceaseless eccentric antics have long since ceased to alarm his mother—a woman accustomed to all manner of things and weary of monotony—who had resolved to settle her wayward child down by marrying him off in the conventional manner. But she was out of luck. Harold met Maud. At a funeral.

Harold loved to see people off on their final journey. He had no idea what to do with his life, finding solace at other people’s funerals as he anticipated the happiness of passing on to the next world. But Maud—Maud, unlike Harold—knew what she wanted from life, finding joy in the fact that her time had not yet come, which meant she still had time left to fill with something. And she filled it with Harold.

These two opposites, having met, could not simply part ways, drawn together by an inevitable mutual curiosity: she set out to warm up the “frozen” young man, while he sought to understand where the old woman found so much vigor when the end—so dear to him—was so near. The classic attraction between two opposites opened the eyes of the long-stagnant boy to a flood of all sorts of things, jostling the passive young man with restlessness and forcing him, as he turned around, to see the power of movement and a multitude of things unknown to him.

Events from the turbulent past of the spirited Maud, surfacing in nostalgic memories, awaken Harold’s interest in life, while the inviting, guiding rock ballads of cult guitarist Cat Stevens support his desire to take a firm and decisive step forward, instilling in him the conviction that one can take much more from life than simply give it away.

For Mod, who has lived out her life, this strange boy is not just another risky experiment by a whimsical old woman—he is her last chance to rid herself of doubts: Was she right to turn her life upside down like this? Was it a mistake? And is there anyone in the world who can share his fate with her?

A chance encounter gives the two of them faith in themselves, allowing them to shape their own future without relying on maternal pity or the advice of hack fools, becoming an unfathomable mystery to psychoanalysts and evoking bitter regret among those bound by the shackles of the church: they are free, they are alive, and they will live—truly. As long as their strength holds out.

Harold’s foolish antics and Maud’s defiant behavior—the subtle fragrance of a self-destructive comedy that unites the beginning of life with its end, awakening with fading, framing a bond to which all the years are subject, that bond which veils the eyes of the blossoming Bud Cort like mist and rolls like pearls down the fading cheeks of Ruth Gordon, convincing us that the impossible is possible, whether at twenty or even at eighty… five.