La française et l'amour

Many very good French actors when they were younger: Jean-Paul Belmondo, François Périer, Claude Rich, Annie Girardot, Michel Serrault, Paul Meurisse, Marie-José Nat, Dany Robin, Martine Carol. Many very good French directors when they were younger: Henri Verneuil, René Clair, Jean Delannoy, Jean-Paul Le Chanois, Henri Decoin, Christian-Jaque, Michel Boisrond. But the film is not great, it is very didactic and infantile.

This is an interesting film because like several other European films of the 1960s it's an anthology--directed by several different people. However, unlike many such films, this one actually plays almost like one long story instead of a collection of short films--especially because in a few stories, the characters appear to be the same--just older. Each story is about a different aspect of love--such as curiosity, marriage, infidelity and divorce. They all purport to be about women, though without the men in the film, none of these stories would have worked! Now compared to American films of 1960, this film might have seemed a tad bawdy. After all, it talked about adultery, premarital sex and the like, though a few American films of the day actually were beginning to address these issues as well--just not quite as quickly and directly as this film. Though, even for the supposedly open French, it was cute to see that the French parents, too, struggled with telling their kids the true facts of life. Also, while the film could seem a bit amoral in not openly condemning adultery, the film also seemed to affirm marriage in the cute segment where divorce lawyers and a nosy mother managed to ruin a perfectly good divorce.

Overall, the directing, writing and acting were all very good and I really had a hard time telling that they actually used multiple directors, as they all seemed well integrated into the film and were universally entertaining.

In France the past master of the movie made out of sketches was Julien Duvivier;no other director came close in this field .He never collaborated with other directors in this genre and his shorts were never included in those portmanteau movies made by different artists .

"La française et l'amour" is panned by most of the French critics ,but when they wrote off the French cinema of the fifties as dismal ,they neglected many good works :nowadays ,some of them tend to reverse their opinion.

"La française et l'amour" does not hold a candle to the Italian equivalents of the time ;a curate's egg best describes it.

Take the first one :it was made by a director on the decline, Henri Decoin ,but who,along with Duvivier and Clouzot ,lent credibility to French films noirs ;here his segment deals on a (at the time) taboo subject ;in 1960 , one rarely told the children how babies were made ; this may be a farce ,but parents did not know how to tell them the truth ;it would be 1968 before sex education really appeared .

Delannoy was one of the two main bete noires of the nouvelle vague, but he made many good movies ignored by the snobs ;his segment ,supposed to depict teenage angst falls flat though;and Roger Pierre,a comic actor ,as the Prince Charming ,well....

Boisrond is probably the most mediocre director of the batch ;his segment ,dealing with virginity , is totally bland and dull ,with poor acting at that .

Things go better (it could not get worse) with the following segment ,directed by celebrated René Clair ,helped by two wonderful actors , Claude Rich and Marie-José Nat : the honeymoon and the first row , because of a hat , of another man and another woman on the train ,and of cutting remarks about the bride's family ; Clair's sketch has elegance going for it.

Henri Verneuil , generally overlooked by the highbrows,but adored by the mainstream audience (whom I side with) ,manages pretty well with adulterer : deadpan Paul Meurisse, charming Dany Robin and handsome cynical Belmondo ,with a good supporting role by Claude Piéplu as a boring guest at the restaurant give the segment wit ,and the husband's final trick is smart.

Christian-Jaque ,another legend of the French cinema ,was a spent force in the sixties , but his sketch ,very well acted by two luminaries Annie Girardot and François Périer ,treats divorce in a very original way : both want to get divorce , but they've got no reason why. You must accuse your spouse , if you want to get divorce , it's the law !So their lawyers begin to set the wife against the hubby and vice versa; it sometimes verges on absurd ,which is fine with me.

You can stop here for the last sketch ,directed by the second bete noire of the NV ,Jean-Paul LE Chanois -who did produce good works in the late forties / early fifties,I insist -is rubbish ;Robert Lamoureux is ideally cast as a crook ,but the story never takes off ,after a promising start with Simone Renant's speech for his defence. The screenplay totally misses the point , beauty Martine Carol as a lonely heart?

An erratic work : by keeping segments 4,5 and 6 you get an enjoyable film ;at 132 min, it's overlong.

The seven stages in the life of the modern Frenchwomen are disclosed by seven directors in a witty way: (1) Childhood: a girl asks her parents how the children are born and the adults do not know how to explain. They discuss the subject with her teacher and friends and find an unreasonable explanation. (2) Adolescence: A teenager flirts and kisses many boys and her parents are worried about her behavior. (3) Virginity: A young hairdresser is in doubt whether she shall go to bed with her fiancé. She decides to spend her first night with him before their wedding and they go to a hotel. However, she hesitates and her fiancé surprisingly decides to wait for a next time. (4) Marriage: A recently married couple travels by train to Paris for their honeymoon. During the trip, their marriage is affected by jealousy and selfishness. (5) Adultery: After ten years of marriage, a twenty-nine year-old woman is frustrated with the attitudes of her husband. When they have dinner with another couple, a young man flirts with the married woman and they have a love affair. When her husband discovers that his wife has a lover, his reaction is totally unexpected. (6) Divorce: A married couple realizes that they are now only friends and their relationship has no longer sex drive. They decide to have an amicable divorce, but her mother, their friends and the lawyers spoil their friendship. (7) The Single Woman: A Don Juan seduces women to take advantage. However, when he meets a saleswoman that lives with an old lady and a repressed friend, he seduces both women and ends in prison.

The seven segments of "La Française et l'Amour"have funny and also dated moments, but in general they are entertaining. My favorite is the first one ("Childhoo"), the fifth ("Adultery") and the sixth ("Divorce"). It is funny to see how a modern society in 1960 is do dated fifty-one years later. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "A Francesa e o Amor" ("The Frenchwoman and the Love")

7 episodes, tracking seven stages in the love life of the average Frenchwoman in the 1960s, each with a different director, writer, cast, etc. Episodes 1 ("L'Enfance") & 7 ("La Femme Seule") are amusing if slight (7 benefits from the quirky, unique Silvia Monfort). Episodes 2 ("L'' Adolescence") & 6 ("Le Divorce") are fast, inventive, free-form, playful (they play with the film medium itself & are prone to flights of fancy). Episode 5 ("L'Adultère") is a sophisticated take on adultery. Episode 3 ("La Virginité") is wonderfully tender and intimate - like watching real people. It could only have been written by a woman....and what do you know, it was. Episode 4 ("Le Mariage") is the best of all: set almost entirely in a train compartment, it is hilarious, insightful, with a brilliantly choreographed silent sequence. My order of the 7 segments from favorite to least would be: 4 > 3 > 5 > 2 > 6 > 7 > 1. But none of them are bad, and at least five of them are very good indeed. There is also witty animation throughout. *** out of 4.