Released in 1971, at the height of Hollywood’s brief but extraordinary flirtation with the counterculture, Harold and Maude remains one of American cinema’s most peculiar romantic comedies.

Directed by Hal Ashby, whose understated anarchism would become a defining feature of the New Hollywood era, the film approaches death, love and social conformity with an irreverence that is both mischievous and unexpectedly profound.

Bud Cort plays Harold, a wealthy, death-obsessed young man who stages elaborate suicides to the indifference of his emotionally vacant mother. Ruth Gordon is Maude, a 79-year-old eccentric whose appetite for life extends to stealing cars, uprooting trees and disregarding most conventions of respectable society. Their unlikely romance reverses the usual assumptions about youth and age: Harold is prematurely exhausted by existence, while Maude has acquired, through considerable suffering, an almost radical capacity for joy.

Beneath its eccentric humour lies a precise critique of bourgeois respectability, institutional authority and the peculiar human talent for confusing propriety with morality. Ashby’s satire is sharpest when it is least emphatic; the military, the church, psychiatry and the family reveal their absurdities with very little assistance.

Cat Stevens’ songs lend the film a tenderness that occasionally borders on sentimentality, but Ashby’s dry comic timing keeps it largely in check.

Initially misunderstood by critics and audiences, the film gradually acquired its cult status. More than half a century later, its central provocation remains remarkably intact: that the art of living may have less to do with youth, freedom or happiness than with the courage to take existence seriously without taking its conventions seriously at all...

This film is chosen by Maaike