L'ennui

This film is a work of genius, capturing the feeling of Ennui in explicit detail. The sex scenes are just that, scenes of sex. To show passion would be to break out of the male leads feeling of boredom or ennui. The female part if one dimensional to give her no redeeming features, after all the male wants her but can't understand why he wants her as she does nothing for him, his pursuit is simply because he can't control her. If she showed any kind of feelings towards him the film would be finished. The film is about obsession and not being able to do anything else because this obsession controls your life and takes all your energy. I found the film both breathtaking and disturbing in equal measures. Definitely one to watch.

Yet another overheated French melodrama about sexual obsession, this time based on an old Alberto Moravia novel.

While the three main roles are more than adequately filled by Charles Berling, Sophie Guillemin and Arielle Dombasle, the surfeit of pretentious talk wears the film down and soon grows tiresome (even to hardened art-house film addicts like myself). The main reason to keep watching (apart from the copious sex scenes, of course) is to follow Berling's gradual deterioration from a merely curious seeker of a casual sexcapade to fully-fledged manic depressive. Having a teenaged, plump ugly duckling as the object of his desire has some novelty value, but ultimately her character is so distant and self-centered that one cannot fully empathize with Berling's plight. Also, I haven't read the novel myself but the (relative) happy ending seems misjudged. The vaguely surreal dinner sequences where Berling is introduced to the girl's parents as her music teacher (especially those scenes featuring her cancer-ridden, speech-impaired father) ironically offer a respite from all the glumness but, in retrospect, seem to belong to a totally different film.

Italian film director Damiano Damiani had previously adapted the same source material for the screen as LA NOIA aka THE EMPTY CANVAS (1963) which starred Horst Buchholz, Catherine Spaak and Bette Davis (as Buchholz' mother!), a role which was omitted completely by Cedric Kahn for his modern version. I haven't watched the Damiani film but I would certainly like to, especially since it features a good cast: besides those already mentioned, Isa Miranda, Georges Wilson and Daniela Rocca, also appear.

When you adapt a work by Alberto Moravia to the screen, you know that human detachment, alienation or themes thereof are going to dominate.

That's what happens in 'L'Ennui' -- characters driven by excess, searching for the unsearchable or the unreachable. The ambiguity of the word 'ennui' fits very well: in English translation, the word can mean not only boredom but also human emptiness. This is what I believe director Cedric Kahn was aiming for, and he's certainly on target.

This is a descent into an obsessive abyss by Martin, played by Charles Berling with such frenetic neuroticism that he all but leaps off the screen. He lives and suffers through the lives of others. He meets Cecilia, a 17-year-old artist's model, stunningly portrayed by Sophie Guilleman. Martin asks questions about the artist, who died shortly after an obsessive love affair with Sophie. Despite his extensive intellectual training in philosophy (a Moravia-Kahn 'in-joke' here), Martin cannot fathom the emotional emptiness of Cecilia, who is a character straight out of, well, the existential literature of Moravia and Camus (Cecilia reminded me of the latter's Mersault in 'L'Etranger,' a classic study of human detachment).

Martin asks Cecelia endless questions about emotional matters, but she cannot answer them. She only understands transient forms of pleasure (never 'happiness'), and her laissez-faire attitude drives Martin into increasing levels of madness. He thinks he loves her, but he has no understanding of love at all, and cannot find the centre of Cecilia's amiable indifference. He screams about 'possessing' her, as if she were a commodity. She neither loves nor hates him; she is simply neutral, which Martin cannot grasp.

This is a brilliant work on a difficult subject, although it's perhaps about 20 minutes too long. Slowly and meticulously, Kahn unpeels the layers of the endless human dilemma called love.

Once again, the French have delivered a film that just wouldn't see the light of day in Hollywood. I can hear the producers in LaLaLand now: who wants to pay for a film that focuses on a basic philosophical problem: the nature of human existence? Fortunately, we can still see these kinds of films, but they'll never come from Hollywood.

Very French film in which a jaded, self-centred philosophy professor becomes embroiled in a physically consuming, but emotionally vacant, relationship with a blank young girl. Unpleasant, claustrophobic and sharply humorous, it boasts strong performances from all its cast. But eventually the film's focus, as narrow as that of its central character, starts to become a little wearing. Not wholly successful, but interesting nonetheless.

Based on the novel of Alberto Moravia, "L'Ennui" tells us the story of a philosphy teacher (Charles Berling) who, just separated from his wife, meets the young and buxom Cecilia, former model of a painter who died making love to her. As their relationship grows, we fall with Berling into despair (when he is unable to quit her even if he wants to) and even jealousy. The famous scholar cannot find relief in his knowledge, nor in his irritated former wife and is therefore condemned to wander alone, following this woman, directly out from a Renoir painting, he love and despise at the same time and his depiction is really living.