La chamade

...Françoise Sagan!It takes a genius of a director to successfully adapt one of her airport novels.It happened once with "bonjour tristesse" ,because of M.Preminger and his interprets Deborah Kerr,Jean Seberg and David Niven.It never happened again .

It is cinema with the feeling and sincerity of cellophane .The terrible human problem which tortures the heroine is: can money buy happiness? Shall I live with a young reporter or shall I stay with a still handsome greybeard ? Shall I have to work and give up my idleness?You've got the picture?

Catherine Deneuve achieves a minor tour de force by turning this futile superficial boring young girl into an endearing character.That does not make "la chamade " a good film for all that.As far as the French bourgeoisie depictions are concerned,you'll always be better off with Claude Chabrol 's works,particularly "la femme infidèle" (1968)

Alain Cavalier began quite well with two political movies "l'insoumis"(1964) and "le combat dans l'île"(1961),then got lost before redeeming himself in the eighties with "un étrange voyage" (1980) and chiefly his wonderful "Thérèse"(1986) which will probably remain his masterpiece.

Courtesy of MGM Movie Channel I was at last allowed to see one of the best popular films of 1968 in France. 'La Chamade'. This is a disgracefully neglected film which manages in a not too dissimilar way to Antonioni's 'Blow Up' to show the compulsion and emptiness of living with too much leisure and wealth.

Deneuve is at her most beautiful and along with 'Belle de Jour' this must be one of her more complex roles of the period. The extraordinary thing about the film is that the characters roam the bars and go to parties and chic restaurants and musical evenings seemingly oblivious to the political trauma that was happening in 1968.

If memory serves me right Sagan wrote 'La Chamade' before the events of May '68 and for all I know the film may have been completed before the month of May, but in hindsight the facts that we now know cast a long shadow over the lives of these beautiful people consumed by their own selfish desires. A small masterpiece.

Slick but rather tedious romantic melodrama from a novel by Francoise Sagan, despite the presence of two of European cinema's most representative - and durable - actors in Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli (who've been teamed a staggering 16 times throughout the years but their best moment, surely, was in Luis Bunuel's sublime BELLE DE JOUR [1967]).

With a plot that's too thin - and familiar - to sustain its length, the film depends entirely on its two stars: Piccoli, however, has played this role far too often (including THE GAME IS OVER [1966] which preceded it; see review above) but Deneuve - at the height of her beauty - is as captivating as ever. Still, Roger Van Hool is vapid as Deneuve's young lover - which rather prevents audience involvement in the couple's plight!

Mark Twain once said that anyone who picked a cat up by the tail learns never to pick a cat up by the tail again. In this film, no one picks the cat up by the tail, therefore no one seems to learn much. It is painful to see an actress of Deneuve's quality going from scene to scene without intensity. Most the time she is either walking, walking, walking or drinking, drinking, drinking. To me, she is simply unconvincing as lover in this film. Except for the first few scenes, one feels one is looking through a photo album haplessly put together. There seems to be very little passion in Lucille falling out of love for Charles, into love for Antione, and out of love for Antione. Consider this: Perhaps the film is a victim of the times. The intellectualism of the Beatniks of the 1950s and the rebellion of the hippies of the early 1960s was morphing into the leisure suits of the 1970s. And the logic of the film seems askew. Can an expensively kept partner of a very wealthy member of the upper class find love and happiness with a poor immature writer living in a one-room apartment in the projects? It all seems too unlikely. All film fans have to suspend a certain amount of disbelief, but you'd have to live on another planet to accept the plot of this film. I can't recommend this movie.

Lucille (Catherine De Neuve age 28) is the mistress of Charles (Picolli age 46) she lives the beautiful carefree life of luxury. She meets Antoine a young artist (real age 30) and starts an affair with him. Charles is willing to allow it but Antoine is jealous.

De Neuve lives awhile with Antoine and predictably it doesn't work. She epitomizes that carefree 60s spirit that another reviewer analyzed correctly as women not really knowing what they wanted (and they never found it).

In any case you watch this movie for 60s nostalgia (all the Citroen DSs) not intellectual content and for that purpose if is first class even if it is an airport novel adapted to movie.

The actors were perfect for the roles they play...Antoine a little too Anthony Perkins looking to be totally handsome...and Charles the perfect rich sugar Daddy. De Neuve of course the prize.