Les dragueurs

Jacques Charrier and Charles Aznavour meet by chance late on a Saturday afternoon and decide to go looking for women together.

Jean-Pierre Mocky's first movie as director has an interesting if ultimately moral arc. Aznavour is shy and uncertain. He hopes to find a wife. Charriere says he believes in one true love, and not settling for less.... but is quite willing to settle for a physical encounter when he can find one. As they encounter a long series of beautiful women looking for someone who seems to be neither Charrier nor Aznavour, the two of them become more desperate and despairing, playing tricks in the hope that it will fool women who wish to be fooled,and revealing depths and shallowness of character along the way, in a Paris that seems to be populated solely with good-looking people looking for sex and unable to find it.

I cannot believe that no one has reviewed this superb film. It is a classic from 1960, and has somehow eluded the position it ought to be in; a key film from the emerging ' Nouvelle Vague '. Watching it for the first time in my life recently I could see it was an outsider from that disparate group, because perhaps it is so singular in the way it shows two women chasers ( les dragueurs ) and their semi-conscious need for love. Both Jacques Charrier and Charles Aznavour are perfect in their roles; two young men who meet suddenly and spend the whole of a Paris night looking for a woman to satisfy their physical and emotional needs. I will not spoil who finds a promising partner but one scene I must single out. Charrier and Anouk Aimee facing each other across a Montmartre terrace and the electric reaction between them. It is one of the most moving scenes in French film, and paradoxically the most cruel. It determines what follows in the film and the end of the night itself. A later scene at a party shown in all its horrifying superficiality is superior to any of the party scenes of similar films of the time, including ' La Dolce Vita '. Belinda Lee in her coldest role looks like a living mask of what we call beauty in this world, and she dominates the impending conclusion. It is a bitter, sour film and scratch its surface there is an underlying romanticism that perhaps can never be fulfilled. Jean-Pierre Mocky was not in my opinion given credit enough for this fast paced, exciting and troubling exercise of desire and desperation, and I have to admit it is way ahead of many other films of its time in its portrayal of the itching lust that underlines most men's lives and their incapacity often to see love when they find it. Godard never made such an objectively emotional film. Truffaut never so hard hitting, and the melancholy romance of Demy, good though it is never surpasses the truth of life that is here in Mocky's first film as a director. I wish I had discovered it years ago but like most people, it seems I had overlooked that it was there. I am not a fan of Maurice Jarre as a composer but his score for this semi-lost treasure is superb. A great cast, a great cinematic experience. I would give it much more than 10 if I could.