Fahrenheit 451

Truffaut’s first English language film, and his first film shot in colour, is a visually elegant science fiction story about a future in which television dominates people’s lives and where books are forbidden. Montag (Oskar Werner) burns books for a living. He and his wife Linda live in an opulent suburban house where she takes pills to calm her while she interacts with the giant TV screen on her wall. Montag is bored but unaware of the nature of his alienation until he meets a radical schoolteacher on a train. Soon he picks up a forbidden book and begins reading. Under-rated on its original release, the film now impresses with a visually experimental colour palette and stark futurist sets which imaginatively represent the landscape of a technological fascism. Based on Ray Bradbury’s chilling novel, which itself was influenced by the book-burnings of totalitarianism, the film version now seems prophetic of our contemporary world where telecommunications are changing the nature of our immediate, physical interaction with the world. Julie Christie impresses in a difficult duel performance as Linda and as the schoolteacher.