La chamade

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!

I am prompted to review not based on any passionate feelings for this movie. I tend to agree with those reviewers who did not "feel" Deneuve's portrayal of Lucile in the movie and thus, I think this movie failed. I think in fact all of Sagan's adaptations to film have failed.

But that is why I am adding my review, to disagree with the reviewer who called the original novel "silly." In fact, there is nothing more beautiful and poignant, simultaneously light and heavy, light and dark, as a Francoise Sagan novel. I don't say she is one of the greatest or most profound of French writers even in the 20th century, but she is so far from being silly it offends the senses to hear it; she has a perfect grip of the human heart and its dance with the human mind, and a magnificent grasp of phrasing, enough to convey profundity and round the most incidental of characters that most writers would allow to lay flat.

As this is not a place to review the novel, I will only say in contrast to the film that Lucile's struggle between Antoine and Charles is not passionless nor can it be summed up simply as a "heart vs. head" conflict, although I appreciate this is the easiest way to summarize and is not inaccurate. In short, it gets a 5 from me and not a zero because it is so faithful to the book, and yet, it gets a 5 and not a 10 because (I suspect) the direction and performances were inadequate to the task of explaining the relationships, the everyday, everyman experiences of love &/or heartbreak that Sagan originally put down so masterfully.

Catherine Deneuve is one of film's all time great beauties who has also become a very fine actress. At this point in her career, she was still blank but beautiful. Her Director put this to good use, casting her as a woman who is pampered, spoiled, a woman for whom life has given her so much she is completely lost and has no idea what she really wants, but drifts from vague whim to whim. Of course, she is such a beauty that she is perfect casting for this kind of woman who has men falling over themselves just to light her cigarette, and the kind of jealousy and possessive controlling impulses beauty brings out in men.

Lightly handled, this film is a visual discussion of the true nature of love, and the tradeoffs we make in finding the right relationship. Money and stability, passion and poverty are contrasted, with some surprising revelations about what makes a love meaningful and lasting. Yves St. Laurent supplies the really amazing wardrobe for the sequences of wealth ( I counted at least 5 really flawlessly coutured coats), which seems at first to make this film very glossy and superficial and "what will she wear next" – but this supplies our framework of seeing how unimportant these things are to her, and also builds a great contrast for the sections of everyday financial struggles.

This film is greater than the sum of it's parts. Great costumes, some postcard style cinematography, and a fine performance by Roger Van Hool as the obsessed Antoine, and an exceptional, nuanced performance by Michel Piccoli as Charles. (He and Deneuve had made several films together by this point, which augments the familiar feeling between them.)

Because DeNeuve is still young here, and the essential capricious coldness of her character, this film does not supply as much emotional connection or depth as it could. We have only Piccoli as a window for that, so this film becomes a man's view of the beautiful woman they adore, and a fine representation of their incomprehension of women. Historically, falling in step with "free love" and early feminism, it is a great representation of that special time when men really could not figure out what women wanted… because women were still trying to figure it out themselves.

A heart that beats "the chamade" (la chamade is a particular drum beat) is a heart ready to surrender to the charms of an adversary. This film is a poor adaptation of Françoise Sagan's tedious novel of the same name. In the novel, Sagan, faithful to her fetish themes of indolence, gilded youth, easy money, and fast cars, depicts in unflattering terms the superficiality and immorality of the French high bourgeois society of the 1960s. Sagan and Chevalier collaborated on the thin, tiresome screenplay. The three main characters are so flatly drawn that even two high-caliber actors such as Deneuve and Piccoli must continuously struggle through tepid platitudes and situational predictability throughout. Roger Van Hool as Deneuve's young lover is so insipid as to effectively block any audience sympathy for the story. We are quickly bored with the comings and goings of these three uninteresting characters, and we don't care about what happens by the film's end.

Of course, I know of many fates worse than spending 100 minutes watching the camera caress La Belle Catherine -- a forty-years younger one, as well -- but if that's all the film has to offer, then ultimately it's just not worth watching.

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.