Harold is a young man exasperated with his materially cosseted life and his emotionally detached mother, vainly trying to get her to desist from drawing up plans for him through repeatedly staging his own suicide. Things change when he meets Maude, a septugenarian free spirit, who takes his attention completely off his own proccupations with her antics, leading to the blossoming of a romantic relationship between them.
To call Harold and Maude wilfully oddball is somewhat stating the obvious, and socially it's very much a product of its era, a time capsule of Vietnam-era West Coast lack of respect for authority and conventional behaviour. It's also very funny in places, then swinging to true pathos, without one tone steamrollering the other. To see it is to be reminded again that, once, there was such a thing as New Hollywood, a cinema that could genuinely surprise, and that was not just considered arthouse for the few.
7/10
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