Harold and Maude

Summer loving in the city.

By Angelo Muredda

DIRECTED BY HAL ASHBY

Not content to leave all the fun of outdoor screenings to series like TIFF in the Park, Yonge-Dundas Square started its own free summer programming last month with Tommy.

This week the Square, which recently saw Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne birthing himself out of a space bubble, screens Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby’s much-beloved dark comedy about a May-December romance between a morbid twentysomething (Bud Cort) and a frank octogenarian (Ruth Gordon), both of them funeral crashers. YDS is sticking to cult classics, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more warmly received consensus pick: it is, after all, the movie Matt Dillon pretended to love to win over Cameron Diaz in There’s Something About Mary.

Ashby’s been back in the spotlight these days, posthumously hailed by Steven Soderbergh on his Magic Mike press tour for being the height of smart studio filmmaking. And Harold and Maude itself was just welcomed into the hallowed halls of the Criterion Collection last week. Whether it’s to hear Cat Stevens/Yusef’s lovely soundtrack in a public space or to grapple with the film’s thorny relationship to Vietnam in an audience that ought to be as demographically diverse as the protagonists, it’s well worth revisiting.