Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976)

Jean-Luc Bideau: Max

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Quotes 

• Madeleine : You didn't fasten your seat belt.

  Max : You neither. And you're smoking.

  Madeleine : Is it forbidden?

  Max : No. But it will be next year.

  Madeleine : And the year after?

  Max : You won't be allowed to listen to the radio in the car.

  Madeleine : And after that?

  Max : No more talking in the car.

  Madeleine : And after that?

  Max : No more dreaming. And then there will be war, or rather fascism.

• Max : I just want you to teach capitalism can collapse.

  Marco : I did. And they fired me for it.

  Mathieu : You make me sick with all your talking. It's so simple. We work to earn a living. With our work, they make a profit. And with the strength left over, some of us try to fight the system.

• Max : What are you selling?

  Salesman Friend of Max : The wind. The wind blows over the bread winners, and I sweep up the dough.

• Max : Or else you're looking for God.

  Madeleine : Already found him.

  Max : What's he like?

  Madeleine : He's here, in the explosion that opens, the lotus on top of your head. When you make love standing up, holding back your seed, and letting it rise transcendent, along your spine, just to here. The energies join to make the great emptiness, thoughts without objects.

• Madeleine : And roulette?

  Max : It's death. Time standing still. Chance! G-d the Father in a little ball. The only place where he exists, beard and all.

  Madeleine : Do you win?

  Max : No, I lose. Everyone goes to the casino to lose. They don't know it, but it's their deepest motivation, the desire to be a loser. The casinos, they know it. True happiness is losing all.

  Madeleine : Usually disillusion like yours comes around forty-five, when hopes haven't been fulfilled. Men want history to go as fast as life. It doesn't work that way. I first thought you were an activist.

  Max : As you see, I'm not. Not anymore.

• Max : What was May '68 for you?

  Madeleine : Cherry blossom time. Cherry blossom time. And what then?

  Max : Afterwards nothing changed.

  Madeleine : You think so? I'm not sure.

  Max : Nothing changed. Everything's worse than before. Apart from crazes. Whole earth, macro-something food, dirty children, casual sex, Tantrism, also rubbish. I only see one thing: Kissinger circling the world, that's the bloody truth.

• Madeleine : You're a pessimist, Max. You want your acts to have effects. You're a utilitarian. I produce nothing. Soon you'll make love to me.And you'll think about morality.

  Max : That's interesting.

  Madeleine : If you hold back your semen, it's for a practical reason. Making a baby or not. Wenn Sie Zurück Halten, If you hold it back, it means you're dissolving in the great emptiness. And if you release it, you're trying to be one with the fullness of life. You change religion into morals. I destroy morals through religion.

  Max : Aren't you complicating a very simple thing?

  Madeleine : You complicate things, dividing them in two. Good and bad, useful and harmful. You think like a court of law, always judges and lawyers.

  Max : I'm all that?

  Madeleine : Tantrism is the erotic game of the cosmos inside the mind. All the difference is here. Max, you're death. Not because of roulette, but by dividing things:: masculine and feminine, head and body, sex organs and the face. It makes you aggressive and stiff. I'm whole and one: death by fusion and dissolution in the universe.

  Max : You're hysterical. But I like you.

  Madeleine : I like you too.

• Max : Everybody looks for an escape: the body, nature, sex, onions, lotus flowers. Small consolations in an intolerable world which is said to be unchangeable.