Le Bel Age which is also referred to in the film as a book title (Translated there as Love Is When You Find It) is a French literary expression for Youth but also connotes the question, what is the appropriate age to still engage in the game of picking up women and when is it the right time to give it up, it also suggests the good old times.
The collaboration between Pierre Kast and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (the latter co-writing and playing one of the main characters) is of interest as a sophisticated expression of the game of love, told in three flashback episodes from a forest setting where both the men and the women are seen with guns engaging in a different kind of hunt
The first episode is set in a classy several levels boutique where women don't seem to have an issue about stepping in to shop for art objects, records or whatever knowing that the men standing around are waiting in competition to flirt with them, it is taken from a Moravia story.
These are upper middle class at least people of leisure who have the wherewithal to jaunt off on excursions to Deauville, Saint-Tropez or a ski resort to continue their amorous attempts
It is to the filmmakers' credit that they don't give us just a masculinist (and what might seem today as sexist) perspective but offer their third episode from the point of view of one of the women, where we see the ladies strategizing on their own about how to handle the men
An interesting cast has been assembled including New Wave heartthrob Jean-Claude Brialy and novelist Boris Vian and the Italian Marcello Pagliero who worked with Rossellini.
The overall oeuvres of both Kast and Doniol-Valcroze are worth pursuing further. Both made important contributions at Cahiers Du Cinema (the latter actually was one of its founders) and represented with the more well known Rohmer (the witty philosophizing about love in Le Bel Age may remind the viewer somewhat of him) a generation roughly ten years older than that of Chabrol, Godard, Rivette and Truffaut) and they didn't always incline toward the main line of that publication.
