Reseñas de la crítica

[Shampoo is] a Los Angeles-set sex farce in which the undercurrents of melancholy and cynicism have the power of a sucker punch – one that hits home on both a personal and national level... The film hasn’t dated at all. On the contrary, its prescience is still eerie.

George suggests a Hollywood starlet in the guise of a male alpha, and Beatty mixes conventional gender coding with biochemical ease, investing Shampoo with a modernity that’s far ahead of most romantic farces... Farces are usually governed by speed—by precise clockwork plotting—but Ashby fashions a looser, more atmospheric and behaviorally driven tapestry that recalls Robert Altman’s films, only without the snide-ness that can seep into the latter’s work.

The comparisons contemporary critics made to Restoration comedies like William Wycherley’s The Country Wife are apt, and the plot’s farcical payoff, in which George and too many of his playmates collide at the same black-tie dinner, carries a whiff of the golden-age Hollywood comedy classicism exemplified by George Cukor’s Dinner at Eight.

With his sense of oddball kinship and provocative humor, Hal Ashby distinguished himself as one of the most emblematic filmmakers of the radical-chic 1970s Hollywood. [Shampoo is] perhaps his most piquant satire.

...That all of this can happen within a 24-hour-period on Election Day 1968, Shampoo shows just how complex and smart this movie is, while being stylish, sexy, funny and self-aware (I don't have to point out that some of this had to be personal to Beatty's own sexual infamy).

Beatty had conceived of the project as an Aquarian Age Restoration comedy, a gambit that mostly succeeds. The sexual hypocrisy and deceit that motors the film is echoed in the political cynicism that prevails, never more so than when Jack Warden, as a business magnate who is both a cuckold and an adulterer, declares, "Maybe Nixon'll be better. What's the difference? They're all a bunch of jerks."

Made with all the awareness of hindsight, Shampoo offers a sharp sexual satire and a mature statement on both America and Hollywood in 1968, The Graduate as it should have been, perhaps... Ostensibly a farce about fucking for fun and its repercussions, but the laughs are tempered by bleakness and the film ends up saddened by its characters' waywardness.

The film has all the natural comedic ease and dramatic understatement of Ashby's direction, but you can't talk about Shampoo without talking about Beatty... No other writer-actor (and director, though not on this picture) embodied all this American bounty, indulgence, sexiness, careless fun, and self-critical intelligence more than Beatty, especially in this picture. He is harried (as only Beatty can be harried) and yet focused, disheveled yet elegant, courteous yet rakish, befuddled yet sharp.

The film would prove to be one of the last true moments of personal expression in American cinema: Memorial Day weekend 1975 would see history of a different kind in the making, with the release of Jaws (Steven Spielberg).

The ending of the film is perfect because you are left sad for this man. You see his silhouette on the top of the hill, and suddenly... you feel his loneliness. You feel his sadness and isolation. Warren Beatty always managed to convey the sadness behind the womanizing maniac. He never seemed too pleased with himself – he always was able to convey the price such men pay. Without ever being self-pitying. I admire him for that.

It plays like a melancholy answer to The Graduate – complete with original Paul Simon music... The youthful naiveté and reckless adventure that mark those final, iconic moments of The Graduate have been replaced by disillusionment, pathetic posturing and moral apathy... Of the films he made in the '70s, Shampoo feels the least like a Hal Ashby picture. It's too restrained, too closely bound to the tight structuring of Towne and Beatty's remarkable screenplay.

25 years ago, "Shampoo" was a jigsaw puzzle of carnal knowledge deceptively told through the eyes of its nymphomaniac hairdresser (Warren Beatty) and from the perspective of both genders. Directed by Hal Ashby and written by Beatty and Robert Towne ("Chinatown"), the film is an elaborate roundelay of sex, a screwball masterpiece that's inspired everything from "Three's Company" and Beck's "Midnite Vultures" to the Clinton Administration.