Les pas perdus

.....cause I'm going to get my wage

A romantic man (Trintignant) meets in "La Salle Des Pas Perdus" (lost steps concourse)in a railway station ,an attractive woman (Morgan)about ten years his senior;it's love at first sight between the bourgeois woman and the painter of hot cinema posters ("make it dirty,smutty ",says his dirty old man boss.

The plot is rather trite ,and hadn't it been for the actors,it would have been almost worthless;but apart from the two attractive principals ,there is also Jean Carmet ,as Trintignant's pal ,Catherine Rouvel ,as a Hungarish model and Michel Vitold,in the thankless part of the cheated husband who manages to retain his dignity.

In "Paris Au Mois D'Aout " ,another of René Fallet's novel ,the sexes are reversed : it's the forty-something bourgeois (Charles Aznavour) who meets a pretty young English girl (Susan Hampshire)In both movies ,it's a doomed love : too many social barriers ,and in both stories,one of the lovers is married.

The filming was probably 1963 and walking by the Seine without cars was a luxury to see, and that possibility now all but lost. And that ordinary people on low wages could live in the centre of Paris and have attractive one room studios that now would be impossible. Trains you could get on while they are moving, and individual cafes that had that wonderful thing, atmosphere. Paris for the people who worked in shops, and Jean-Louis Trantignant plays a talentless artist who paints posters for sleazy cinemas. He is penniless most of the time and yet, to use the word luxury again he has the freedom of the city where he lives and not the suburbs where he would be now. ' Les Pas Perdus ' is worth seeing for the filming, and the ease with which the camera takes us on a tour of the place as it once was. For this alone it is worth seeing. As for the plot there is hardly one at all, and it solely revolves around the passionate affair between the artist and an older, richer woman. Michele Morgan plays her, but I found very little chemistry between the two leads. The dialogue trivial, and without giving away what eventually happens I would like to say it was predictable and stayed well within the moral conventions of the time. But to see Paris back then gave me great pleasure.

In my reviews of "La soupe aux choux","Le beaujolais nouveau est arrivé" and "Le drapeau noir flotte sur la marmite" I have mentionned René Fallet, a journalist and writer ,who has participated in the dialogues of the films based on his novels.Les pas perdus is another story of René Fallet: the meeting of a young and very romantic man and an nice woman and so the beginning of a love story with moments of joy, but also moments of waiting and anguish. I enjoyed the performances of Jean-Louis Trintignant (the romantic boy), Michèle Morgan (the prudent married wife ), Catherine Rouvel (the young woman who is in love of Georges) and Jean Carmet (the roommate of Georges).