…their cultural value, their great service to the world is to be encased in glass, sacrificed so that when the light shines through them something holy stirs and awakens in us. (…)
Bud Cort is welded to Harold. Rewatching the movie in the last year I found myself drifting from the narrative’s interest in Maude’s life-changing force, and their delicate chemistry. Instead, my eyes drank up Harold, his mod-goth insouciance, his slow warming to Maude and his naked anguish. And after I wince at that gorgeous car’s flattening I watch his narrow, lanky frame silhouetted, backlit by the sun, sacred, exiting to the plink of his own banjo.
