Herzklopfen

Courtesy of MGM Movie Channel I was at last allowed to see one of the best popular films of 1968 in France. 'La Chamade'. This is a disgracefully neglected film which manages in a not too dissimilar way to Antonioni's 'Blow Up' to show the compulsion and emptiness of living with too much leisure and wealth.

Deneuve is at her most beautiful and along with 'Belle de Jour' this must be one of her more complex roles of the period. The extraordinary thing about the film is that the characters roam the bars and go to parties and chic restaurants and musical evenings seemingly oblivious to the political trauma that was happening in 1968.

If memory serves me right Sagan wrote 'La Chamade' before the events of May '68 and for all I know the film may have been completed before the month of May, but in hindsight the facts that we now know cast a long shadow over the lives of these beautiful people consumed by their own selfish desires. A small masterpiece.

Lucille (Catherine De Neuve age 28) is the mistress of Charles (Picolli age 46) she lives the beautiful carefree life of luxury. She meets Antoine a young artist (real age 30) and starts an affair with him. Charles is willing to allow it but Antoine is jealous.

De Neuve lives awhile with Antoine and predictably it doesn't work. She epitomizes that carefree 60s spirit that another reviewer analyzed correctly as women not really knowing what they wanted (and they never found it).

In any case you watch this movie for 60s nostalgia (all the Citroen DSs) not intellectual content and for that purpose if is first class even if it is an airport novel adapted to movie.

The actors were perfect for the roles they play...Antoine a little too Anthony Perkins looking to be totally handsome...and Charles the perfect rich sugar Daddy. De Neuve of course the prize.

I am prompted to review not based on any passionate feelings for this movie. I tend to agree with those reviewers who did not "feel" Deneuve's portrayal of Lucile in the movie and thus, I think this movie failed. I think in fact all of Sagan's adaptations to film have failed.

But that is why I am adding my review, to disagree with the reviewer who called the original novel "silly." In fact, there is nothing more beautiful and poignant, simultaneously light and heavy, light and dark, as a Francoise Sagan novel. I don't say she is one of the greatest or most profound of French writers even in the 20th century, but she is so far from being silly it offends the senses to hear it; she has a perfect grip of the human heart and its dance with the human mind, and a magnificent grasp of phrasing, enough to convey profundity and round the most incidental of characters that most writers would allow to lay flat.

As this is not a place to review the novel, I will only say in contrast to the film that Lucile's struggle between Antoine and Charles is not passionless nor can it be summed up simply as a "heart vs. head" conflict, although I appreciate this is the easiest way to summarize and is not inaccurate. In short, it gets a 5 from me and not a zero because it is so faithful to the book, and yet, it gets a 5 and not a 10 because (I suspect) the direction and performances were inadequate to the task of explaining the relationships, the everyday, everyman experiences of love &/or heartbreak that Sagan originally put down so masterfully.

A heart that beats "the chamade" (la chamade is a particular drum beat) is a heart ready to surrender to the charms of an adversary. This film is a poor adaptation of Françoise Sagan's tedious novel of the same name. In the novel, Sagan, faithful to her fetish themes of indolence, gilded youth, easy money, and fast cars, depicts in unflattering terms the superficiality and immorality of the French high bourgeois society of the 1960s. Sagan and Chevalier collaborated on the thin, tiresome screenplay. The three main characters are so flatly drawn that even two high-caliber actors such as Deneuve and Piccoli must continuously struggle through tepid platitudes and situational predictability throughout. Roger Van Hool as Deneuve's young lover is so insipid as to effectively block any audience sympathy for the story. We are quickly bored with the comings and goings of these three uninteresting characters, and we don't care about what happens by the film's end.

Of course, I know of many fates worse than spending 100 minutes watching the camera caress La Belle Catherine -- a forty-years younger one, as well -- but if that's all the film has to offer, then ultimately it's just not worth watching.

Mark Twain once said that anyone who picked a cat up by the tail learns never to pick a cat up by the tail again. In this film, no one picks the cat up by the tail, therefore no one seems to learn much. It is painful to see an actress of Deneuve's quality going from scene to scene without intensity. Most the time she is either walking, walking, walking or drinking, drinking, drinking. To me, she is simply unconvincing as lover in this film. Except for the first few scenes, one feels one is looking through a photo album haplessly put together. There seems to be very little passion in Lucille falling out of love for Charles, into love for Antione, and out of love for Antione. Consider this: Perhaps the film is a victim of the times. The intellectualism of the Beatniks of the 1950s and the rebellion of the hippies of the early 1960s was morphing into the leisure suits of the 1970s. And the logic of the film seems askew. Can an expensively kept partner of a very wealthy member of the upper class find love and happiness with a poor immature writer living in a one-room apartment in the projects? It all seems too unlikely. All film fans have to suspend a certain amount of disbelief, but you'd have to live on another planet to accept the plot of this film. I can't recommend this movie.