La truite

"Our village called us 'the savages.' We founded a club. ... A club whose aim was to get things out of men without ever giving them anything"

I confess I'm not a big fan of movies that have as their story line a young woman who uses sex with a series of men to rise above her humble upbringing, ala Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face(1933). They feel in some way as misogynistic as they are empowering. I'm even less a fan of movies that relegate Jeanne Moreau to such an undeveloped role, although she does get one nice scene standing up for herself towards the end. Oh, Isabelle Huppert is fine here, flirting and beguiling men to get what she wants out of them and flashing her pert little body along the way, but the story was one-dimensional, outdated, and sloppy.

At one point we see Huppert's reflection in multiple mirrors and it brought to mind Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and Brigitte Bardot in La Parisienne (1957) from decades earlier. Maybe that's because Joseph Losey originally conceived of this film in the 1960's with Bardot in the lead role. There is an attempt to update things via the acceptance of being bi or gay, and Moreau's character is allowed to say "Nowadays, heterosexuality and homosexuality mean nothing. You're either sexual or you're not," which is pretty remarkable for 1982, but it didn't really feel integrated into what was a meandering plot, and the gay husband never seemed like a real person to me.

The young woman's backstory on the trout farm, in particular seeing her father and his buddy molest girls, tries to explain how she became so manipulative, but it could have been so much better told. The dialogue in the film wasn't very satisfying either. When asked what her first impressions of Japan are, she says that there are lots of Japanese. She meets an older woman who encourages her to have sex without shame, saying she's had it 33,000 times in her life. It's not exactly deep, but maybe this banality was part of the point. How sex relates to power is of course the main thing - as a means of social advancement for the young woman, and as a way of dominating and seeking pleasure for the older men after her. Unfortunately, too often there are scenes that don't push a cohesive narrative or develop these characters, only serving to elongate the movie. It just never pulls itself together, which is a shame, given those who worked on it.

I am obligated to practice French as part of language acquisition. (So I had a reason to watch this film). I feel it was a really good and interesting film. It is a story that is different than what we would see in the United States. It is very French.

It was interesting to observe the main character's life on a trout farm. For fun, the family goes out bowling with other another family. They also go to many early 80s French and Japanese discotheques. It was really interesting.

I think I need to watch the film again because there were certain sequences that were hard for me to follow. The ending was really good, I thought. I also felt the performances by Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Pierre Cassel, could have been Oscar-nominated.

In conclusion, with French films, they cast actors who Act the roles really well, even if they have smaller shoulders or no butt. Whereas American films cast gorgeous people, who may not be as advanced as actors. I feel this film is worth watching, and different from American films.

This is the Cinderella story updated to include a dysfunctional Prince Charming who is unable to satisfy his Cinderella so she has to get her jollies by seducing and outsmarting a pair of evil princes (whom she meets bowling...a wonderful surreal touch that is so improbable it actually is quite amusing...think Big Lebowski here)...the only actor out of place is Jeanne Moreau who is simply wasted in a secondary role. I will admit that I am a rabid Huppert fan and would watch her in anything...there is simply no one else like her around and she rescues this film from complete inanity by the sheer weirdness of her beautiful being.

The review on IMDb by David Melville sums up very well some of the problems with this film. So much of the plot just doesn't make sense nor does the casting of Isabelle Huppert in such a demanding role. Melville was right--a vixen like Bardot in her prime could have made it work but Huppert was not up to it. She wasn't believable as a woman this alluring and selfish. But there is so much more wrong with this movie Melville didn't get to--poorly written and often grossly under-developed characters--and in the process wasting talent like Jeanne Moreau, Alexis Smith and her husband Craig Stevens. On top of all that, the story was unappealing, disjoint and almost impossible to follow at times--partly because of the odd way the film bounces around from the present to the past and partly because the film is so dull it's hard to keep up with it.

Despite me hating the film, I have enjoyed some of Isabelle Huppert's movies and French movies are my favorite international films. It's just with so many wonderful French films, I don't advise you to waste your time on this one--it's so much easier to find a film worthy of your time.

Joseph Losey established himself as a gifted filmmaker in the late '40s with The Boy with Green Hair, my favorite film from childhood. The thing about genuine artists is they can't kick the truth. Regardless how wayward they become in their obsessive lifestyles or imaginations, their deepest obsession remains with the truth. Losey would eventually make in the early '60s what was up to that point the best film exploration of the sado-masochistic impulse, The Servant, with the great film actor, Dirk Bogarde, and during that same period the effects of child sacrifice in The Damned. He would later explore the very dark dead-end of multiple sexual partners as a way of life in his film adaptation of Mozart's Don Giovanni (1979). But his great masterpiece, in my view, is his penultimate film, La Truite (The Trout, 1985). He must have experienced great satisfaction in knowing that every critic missed the central theme and all the deeper nuances of what he was conveying in the film, most thinking that it was simply a comic film about a cold-hearted bitch, played perfectly by the ever-surprising Isabelle Huppert. I will not dwell on the complexity of what this film is about, only to mention that it involves a precocious child, Frederique, who discovers much too early in life the sado-masochistic matrix of the world and begins her trek on finding ways to adapt to it while not allowing a core innocence to be destroyed by it, to keep an upper-hand in distance, a postmodern Fanny Price who is elevated not by dominance but by a detachment that, in its severance from God, borders on being the ultimate act of cruelty, indifference. She keeps in tow a hyper-sensitive, self-destructive husband who is gay and who, in discovering the dead-ends of sado-masochistic delight, is devastated every second of every moment by looking long and hard into the reality of love lost in the only territory he knows, the valley of the void where he commits to drinking himself to death. The heroine played by Ms. Huppert has only one ally, an elderly Japanese man who has achieved a similar detachment in his life, and they become spiritual friends. This film is not about a bitch, but about "misdirected transcendency" (Girard) in a world that is severed from God.