On an idyllic Parisian night, a young man is heading for a romantic rendezvous. Though one might expect him to meet up with the typical French socialite for a night involving wine, berets, and the Eiffel Tower, the real surprise is who – or what, rather – our young schmoozer is going to be going home with that evening.
One only has to read the title of this film - not to mention know a bit about its director's odd sense of humor - to realize that Date With a Chicken is going to be a very unusual film. It starts off with a nicely-dressed man in a suit buying a rose from a street side flower vendor, pulling out the address for someone named "Paulette" out of his pocket, and approaching the correct door. Once he presents the flower, however, the title of the film is revealed to be literal as out of the doorway steps an actual chicken. The "date" proceeds as one might expect - the couple walk down the street for a ways, though through most of the film he is seen carrying his date. They dine at a restaurant where there is feed available for the chicken, and after a stroll through the streets of Paris, the man takes his date back to his apartment where things get a little...interesting.
Warning! Spoilers Ahead!
What initially looks like a romantic and stereotypical Parisian date movie - including the classic Eiffel Tower shot - takes a very different turn once it moves into the bedroom. I'll give the director full marks for creativity, as the entire sequence certainly matched the typical bedroom scene...except for the chicken part...
Apparently the director cut two different versions of this sequence, and we were sent the more risque of the two. The whole scene was both creative and very well done, if not bordering a bit on soft-core porn. I really would have liked to see both versions, however, because I think when it comes to sex on screen, subtlety is most often much better. In the days of more moral restrictions, Old Hollywood - and even now in the wildly popular Indian film industry, Bollywood - had to rely on visual cues, such as the iconic scene in Gone With the Wind where Rhett Butler carries Scarlett up the staircase, or in Hitchcock's North By Northwest which implies an intimate night between Carey Grant and Eva Marie Saint by the image of the train they are riding in going into a tunnel. Even in the more modern dark comedy/drama Party Monster, sex between Macaulay Culkin and Wilmer Valdarrama is implied by a cutaway to fireworks - which apparently was a choice made by the director rather than dictated by the actors.
The rather sudden change in style does make me think more of the seedy, twisted porn films of early Hollywood; such as those depicted in the film The Black Dahlia. Ironically, these films tended to be even more disturbing than modern-day pornography. Even with the humorous aspect of Date With A Chicken, it does seem to hint at that particular genre.
What really turned me off to the movie was the ending. As some of the readers might have already guessed, poor Paulette the chicken ends up in her supposed beau's oven. I was half expecting this outcome, but still hated to see it. There was a further humorous ending as the main character pulls out his little black book to reveal tomorrow's date: a cow.
