Les grandes personnes

After making Breathless (and before its success) Jean Seberg made three movies in France exploiting her youth and American accent. The first, Loveplay, is available but only in a poor quality copy, nor is it as rewarding as Time Out for Love. The third, Five Day Lover, probably was never released in video. For Jean Seberg fans Time Out for Love shows her off very well. She first appears as a pig-tailed brunette, Ann, a Nebraska nursing student on a summer vacation. The intention is that she is awkward and naive, but she looks great, especially in a sweater. Later she is transformed by her sophisticated friend, Michele (Micheline Presle), into a glamorous version of her cropped hair Breathless look. Both women share a love interest in a cold-hearted charmer (Maurice Ronet) who has seen better times. As in Loveplay, inevitable disillusionment follows, with the suggestion of life long consequences. Jean and Maurice Ronet are not as engaging as her pairing with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless. But the photographic quality of my copy (Hollywood's Attic release) is far superior to what is available for Breathless, and unlike Breathless, the subtitles are almost all quite readable. If you like Jean Seberg, as an actress or a woman, you should enjoy this film.

I have no particular sympathy with the writings of Roger Nimier, but his dialogue for ' Les Grandes Personnes ' is lucid and well written. The film is based on one of his novels, and it is a chilling world that he depicts superbly directed by Jean Valere whose film ' La Sentence ' is well worth tracking down. But in my opinion ' Les Grandes Personnes ' surpasses even that achievement. It shows in image after image the lack of heart, the lack of any sense of real loving among the so-called important people of the Paris elite of the time. And the film is timeless because these same kind of people still think Paris is a small world that belongs to them, and is their playground for emotional abuse. The first part of the film dominated by Micheline Presle, Francoise Prevost and Jean Seberg is extraordinary, and as much as I like Seberg both Presle and Prevost give their all in acting ability and then some. For a while I thought the film sagged a bit with the entrance of Maurice Ronet, but in his scenes with Seberg visiting all of the ' right ' parts of Paris I saw how hollow he was in his seduction, and also in film terms how Valere ( perhaps ) inadvertently mocked the world of Donen's ' Funny Face '. The calling of each other's names across the emptiness of so-called famous Paris places sent a chill through me. These scenes alone summed up the empty world of Hollywood's Paris and showed in bleached out black and white images the false notion of ' romantic ' decors. Then as the film progressed the breakdown of any sincere relationships hit hard and painfully accurately. Everyone is bruised in this film and the importance of their restricted lives shows a hell equal to Sartre's ' Huis Clos '. I have read that Nimier had a conflict with Sartre's writings, but the ' bad faith ' of this set of characters is existential in the extreme. Seberg's innocence is destroyed and the ending when she recognises the cold world around her made me want to turn away in horror from the screen. Why this masterpiece made at the height of the New Wave of French Cinema has not been championed as a great film is a total mystery. And a plus not to be ignored is Germaine Tailleferre's music, stronger than any Delerue or Legrand score so favoured by people like Demy and Truffaut. I would give this film more than 10 if I could.

This excellent film, whose original French title is LES GRANDES PERSONNES (THE IMPORTANT PEOPLE), has the English language title of TIME OUT FOR LOVE. It is based on a novel by Roger Nimier entitled (in translation) HISTORY OF A LOVE. Nimier was a well known French writer who died tragically young at the age of only 36. I slightly knew his former mistress, and had an interest in him because of his close friendship with one of my favourite writers, Paul Morand. His daughter Marie Nimier is also a novelist, her best known novel perhaps being ANATOMY OF A CHOIR. Another one of her novels has been filmed, and she has also had an original screenplay filmed this year entitled BARRAGE. This film stars the wonderful Jean Seberg, who had made BREATHLESS with Godard the year before. Here, aged 23, she plays a 19 year-old American girl from Lincoln, Nebraska (Seberg herself was from Iowa, which is next door to Nebraska), who has come to Paris speaking fluent French with a strong American accent, to look after an extremely rich uncle who has had a heart attack. He lives in a huge mansion with a very depressing interior, and we get little more than glimpses of him in the film. Seberg wears a wig with pigtails at the beginning of the film to make herself look younger, which is successful. Later she reverts to her short-cropped BREATHLESS look, the perfect gamine. Seberg knows no one and is lonely. She meets a famous woman fashion designer, played by Micheline Presle, and they become intimate friends instantly. Presle has her design office at the top of Galerie Lafayette and lives in style at 2, Rue Rivoli. She and her set are the 'important people' of the original French film title. (The surname Presle is probably the origin of the name Presley in America, and I suspect Elvis may have been of Huguenot descent, as was James Agee, also of Tennessee.) As she is now mixing with an older 'smart set', Seberg is quickly given a makeover and wears designer clothes and has the cropped hair, becoming an overnight glamour gal. Then she meets Presle's rich, fickle, and narcissistic lover, played by Maurice Ronet. They fall in love, and for Seberg this is 'the big one' from which there will never be any emotional recovery. But Ronet's extreme and passsionate love turns out to be a convertible currency, easily changed from one woman to another. He is incapable of loyalty, much less fidelity, and he lacks kindness. A great deal of emotional bruising is unavoidable for any woman who comes near him. His greatest love is himself. There is a documentary profile of the director, Jean Valère, on the Blu-ray disc, in which he says that he had wanted to film JULES ET JIM, but Truffaut beat him to it, so he made this film instead. It is extremely well made indeed. It was released on disc by Gaumont only in 2015, and has English subtitles. It is definitely a classic, no doubt about it, in that rare category of 'extreme romance' films, of which there are so few. (It is just as well there are not more of them, as they are very nerve-wracking and upsetting.) We get a lot of wonderful location footage of Paris as it was in 1960, and the most remarkable thing about that is the incredible absence of traffic everywhere. On one romantic night, Seberg and Ronet stay up all night and visit many famous locations, calling each other's names to each other across considerable distances, without any background noise or traffic. An example is when they stand on opposite sides of the Place de la Concorde and there is not a car in sight, he shouts 'Ann' (Seberg's character name) and she shouts 'Philippe', their names echo in the early morning stillness, and they repeat this in various places. They genuinely 'have Paris to themselves' to celebrate their love in this romantic manner. Such a thing is incredible to us today, as all the European cities are now so over-crowded that it is inconceivable that anyone could shout his or her lover's name anywhere at any hour and expect to be heard at any distance at all. Maurice Ronet was a very good actor, as he proved also in George Lautner's fabulous thriller MORT D'UN POURRI (DEATH OF A CORRUPT MAN, 1977, see my review). He died aged only 55. But that was nothing compared to the terrible tragedy of Jean Seberg's death. She was only 40 when she died mysteriously of an overdose, which may have been either suicide or murder, we shall never know. (Strange how this mystery reminds us of the unsolved deaths also of Natalie Wood and of Marilyn Monroe.) Jean Seberg was such a breath of fresh air, that in a 'breathless' world (pun intended), her gamine face was an inspiration, and her performances rang true. I have already praised her wonderful performance in BONJOUR TRISTESSE (1958, see my review). Even in LILLITH (1996), she magically charmed us as she scared us. One interesting thing I would like to point out about this film is that the film's music is by Germaine Tailleferre, the only female member of Les Six, the six composers of the Montparnasse Era who formed a famous group (including Auric and Poulenc; Auric also became a prolific film score composer, and Germaine herself composed 8 film scores altogether.) Despite the early deaths of the other two stars, Micheline Presle is still with us, even though she was older than both of the others and is now 95. That's what I call staying power! Her last performance in a feature film was in 2012, aged 90, although she subsequently appeared in another film in 2014, aged 92, as 'une passante' (not the same as the one in Baudelaire's poem of that title).