Los amantes

In 1959 this film was considered as something close to porno, but this is far enough from the reality. Jeanne Moreau was young, nice and attractive. She was the star of this film, which goes slowly as usual in French cinema's style. When you see this type of film you must become a psychologist to penetrate inside the brains of each hero and make some conclusions. Accordingly I concluded that life is not a straight line, suddenly something may happen in our lives that deviate completely this straight line. Formal ethics accepted by the society goes sometimes to extremes that does not enable the persons to behave and feel happy. What's wrong when the current life is disrupted to start a new one? At this point I advise you to see this old, and black and white film, which may compel you to think and to conclude something new, probably different to what I am saying here.

The bored and empty upper-class Jeanne Tournier (Jeanne Moreau) lives in a manor with many servants in the countryside of Dijon with her husband Henri Tournier (Alain Cuny) and their daughter Catherine. Henri is the editor of The Burgundy Monitor and has been married to Jeanne for eight years, but he does not give much attention to his wife. Jeanne travels frequently to the house of her childhood friend Maggy Thiebaut-Leroy (Judith Magre) in Paris to meet her lover, the famous polo player Raoul Flores (José Villalonga).

One day, Henri suspects of the frequent trips of Jeanne to Paris and invites Maggy and Raoul Flores to have dinner and spend the weekend in his mansion. While driving back home from Paris, Jeanne car breaks down and the archaeologist Bernard Dubois-Lambert (Jean-Marc Bory) that is going to Montbard to visit a professor, gives a ride to Jeanne. Henri invites Bernard to stay with them and during the night, he has a love affair with Jeanne. On the next morning, Jeanne decides to go away from Henri, Catherine and Raoul with her new lover.

"Les Amants" is the second film of Louis Malle and I can imagine the impact of this amoral story in 1958, with a mother leaving her daughter to seek true love with her younger lover. The muse of many filmmakers Jeanne Moreau is gorgeous and sensual in the role of a woman ahead her time needy for love and happiness. The cinematography in black and white is wonderful and the open conclusion fits perfectly to this sensual film. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Os Amantes" ("The Lovers")

Paris in the 1950s. Film opens with Jeanne & Maggy, two glamorous high society aristocrats, watching a polo game, cheering the star player, the equally glamorous society page poster man Raoul Flores. Later, cozy snuggling between Raoul and Jeanne who, we learn when she goes home, is married to another man -- a prominent newspaper publisher, Henri. Over dinner, we observe quickly that Jeanne and Henri's marriage has been on deep freeze for sometime inside that capacious, ornately furnished countryside mansion. Henri, more or less convinced of Jeanne's affair with Raoul, insisted on having Jeanne invite Maggy and the polo player for the weekend. On her way back from Paris that weekend Jeanne's sports car breaks down. She's given a ride by archaeologist Bernard, definitely proletariat, definitely more comfortable studying rocks from diggings than at the polo field. Henri invites Bernard to stay for the weekend with Raoul and Maggy. At dinner Bernard shown to be an obvious outsider of this group. After everyone goes to bed, Jeanne wanders out into the night in her white, diaphanous nightgown, starting the forty-minute final sequence, the heart of the movie. This is the mildly sensuous moonlit epiphany for Jeanne that true love still can happen. (This sequence was deemed "shockingly erotic" in 1958 when the movie was released, becoming the main reason for calls for censorship, if not outright banning, in many countries). In a long sequence of lyrical black and white, day-for-night shots of shadows in the moonlight, a long walk on a vast field of shrubs and flowers, delicate embraces on a cozy boat floating unaided on a stream, Jeanne falls for Bernard's non-aristocratic, nonhigh-society, proletariat charms. Maybe it is the moonlight, or Bernard's open collar, working-archaeologist shirt, or his 2-cylinder mini-car, or the portentous bat that flew into the room when they were dining, but at the break of dawn, Jeanne decides to leave everything, including her sleeping daughter (another reason which shocked the critics and the Catholic church into condemning this movie) and drive away with Bernard into a new day aborning. (As far as I can remember this is the first movie I know where the central characters, at the fade-out, ride into the sunrise instead of into the sunset. One extra point for the then 25-year old Louis Malle). This movie has acquired its "classic status" for several reasons: It was a notable (and controversial!) work from a young director who was just starting to get noticed (Malle's fifth movie, his second for 1958). It portrayed succinctly the phoniness of the affluent as it showed a portrait of a woman confined within the rituals of her social status and then acting on her sudden feeling to get out. It presented a sex scene considered bold and shocking at that time (Jeanne's orgasm shown only through a close-up of her trembling hand is I think a clever idea from Malle). And it has Jeanne Moreau. (Although for me, anything with Jeanne Moreau is automatically on my personal "classic" list). Even by today's standards I think this is a very well-made movie if only for the subtlety with which Malle presented how these characters show the spectrum of their raw feelings. Moreau is "on every frame" (Malle's words from a 1994 interview) and perfectly so. She shows the build-up in Jeanne's simmering feelings so flawlessly, we actually feel the tension of when it's going to explode. Magre is pure delight as the fully-enjoy-the-moment Maggy. De Villalonga captures perfectly the unctuous charms of someone who's enraptured with his own image, endlessly watching and listening to himself in his own head. Cuny is admirably subtle in showing Henri as someone who has really stopped caring a long time ago, just enjoying watching these people make fools of themselves, eventually to choke on their own flirtations. Note his stiff indifference watching Bernard drive away with Jeanne. In the Moreau performances I've seen, I think this is one of her finest. In her every movie, the main tension is her eyes -- no one really knows what's going on behind that hypnotic stare. Love, passion, hatred, murder, tenderness, bewilderment? We always have to wait for the end of the movie. Some clever prefiguring clues Malle gives us: The bat flying in during their dinner causing a brief consternation -- their fortress has been breached, their aristocracy is not invulnerable anymore. Bernard's mini-car, slow but unstoppable in the highway -- stability, simple and quiet persistence. Bernard freeing the fishes from Henri's traps -- obviously about Jeanne. Excellent, luminous restoration from Criterion of this stunningly photographed black and white film by Henri Decae. Extras include two interviews from Malle and one from Jeanne Moreau. ##

Crazy about French movies ever since I started watching them. The black and white is more appropriate than colour for French film, very captivating and unreal.

What can you say about the French people? Desperados and aficionados of romance and love. Hopelessly romantics.

Simple story told like a poem regardless of any moral criticism, there is no such thing call moral or immoral in the realm of art. Art is a rival to morality, it allows all sorts of existences. In this movie, the sin is adultery but no one cares to condemn it, the pursuit of love takes it all. The love scene might be stunning to the audience in late 50s France, but definitely not today. Jeanne Moreau somehow took a bold step. Anyway, she is radiating gloriously in superb cinematography.

Jeanne Tournier married to a well-off provincial newspaper owner for eight years. She has a daughter, a polo-playing lover and a big bunch of acid-tongued snobbish Parisian friends. Nevertheless, she is bored about living in such a polite society. Finally when Bernard, a young student whom she has known just for a few hours, enters into her life, just after solely one night's time in her husband's villa with him, she decides to leave with him into the uncertain future the very next morning.

Several lyrical scenes impress me a great deal. Their nightly accidental encounter at the garden. Jeanne is illuminating the dimness, she looks like a mystic fairy seducing Bernard. Another one is the astonishing look of her friend when she sees them leaving together. The most memorable is the very last scene, they drive and drive into the unknown, unexplored.

The map shown at the beginning and the voice-over at the end may be something like a warning. However, when two lovers in love that they can sacrifice everything for the romance in such a desperate fashion, nothing is threatening. Feminists or women who are fighting for their freedom would be clapping their hands she's got guts.

As a twenty-something, I saw this film with my boyfriend of the time, and as soon as it was over, we rushed home to do it ourselves. In the early-to-mid sixties, "Les Amants" was eroticism that was certainly explicit--albeit tastefully explicit, to our naive eyes. Made when Malle was twenty-five, with the young Jeanne Moreau, to the romantic Sextette that Brahams wrote when he was 27, this was the perfect sexy romance for its time and place.

I just saw it again, now watching as a sixty-something in an age in which "Les Amants" would probably get an R rating--and a tame one. I'm jaded too. It's hard to feel much sympathy for a desperate housewife of the upper middle class as she battles ennui. But the love sequence is still a knockout. You can't stop to think about it as the lovers, who as yet barely know each other except for their terrific physical attraction, go from garden-to-boat- to bedroom; it's still erotic in its implication. the garden is too lovely to be true, the boat is white and clean, and Moreau wears her pearl necklace throughout, but the message of a woman who has only known pedestrian sex being introduced for the first time to the Real Thing rang a bell with me (I had a similar experience, minus the garden, the pearls and the boat). I sat there bawling my head off-- with nostalgia this time for an unrecoverable experience-- through the whole sequence.

But the ending also rings true. What do you do when you come up for air?

From one of the interviews on the CD, I learned that the plot was based on an 18th century story, and I can readily see that, just as could see the fin-de-siècle Viennese origin of Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut." In neither case does the contemporary updating of the tales make them any less effective.