Eva

Two distinctly dislike-able characters circle one another amid the nicely photographed Venice and Rome locations; unable to break away, unable to be together it seems, but wrecking the lives of those around them. It's a promising scenario, a glamorous setting, a combination of strong cast, top name director and highly rated cinematographer. One could easily imagine Antonioni at the helm with Monica Vitti and Marcello Mastroianni as the stars. But it's not them and it really doesn't work. In the male lead role Stanley Baker is well cast as an out-of-place writer from the Welsh Valleys who's made it big with one book and now lives on an Island near Venice, the new darling of the in-crowd. He's big, bluff and rugged with undeniable presence and a convincing aura of potential violence. He isn't exactly nice to know, but you get the feeling that the right woman could bring him round. Virna Lisi as his fiancée is that woman. A Beautiful, fragile, extremely desirable character, she clearly loves him despite being well aware of his many flaws. So what on earth Baker's character finds in love-rival Eva is the huge stumbling over which this whole movie falls. Disbelief can only be suspended to a degree. Eva isn't the sort of woman to bring out the best in anyone. She's clearly supposed to be some kind of irresistible sexual predator who the ex coal miner cannot resist but she's portrayed as frankly repellent. A pouting, scornful, self obsessed gold-digger who plays off lovers against pretend-husbands. She treats Baker's character with taunting disdain at every turn and yet he follows her like an eager lap-dog. Her character might, just might, have worked if an actress of spectacular sexual allure had been cast. Instead Eva is played by Jeanne Moreau. She's a fine actress but she has nothing of the Machiavellian Femme Fatale that the role absolutely demands. Take a look at the poster/DVD sleeve photo of her with cigarette dangling from a sour, down-turned mouth. It's clear this is an actress who's screen persona is more Bette Davis than Brigit Bardot - more Rachael Roberts than Julie Christie. She plays the role with conviction but cannot communicate the essential level of sex-appeal to make the story work, even when the demure camera work teases us with extended near- views of her undressing(this is an early 60s film, so explicit it's never going to be, a lot of wardrobe doors and bath taps are strategically positioned) it all just looks more sordid than sexy. It's just not her role and no amount of beautifully filmed scenes of a wintry Venice, or glamorous parties, or stylised interiors or Alfa Romeo sports cars can overcome that. There is also some poor direction of the actors - of Baker in particular, who gets a bit too over- Shakespearian in his emoting at times (early on - the hand clawing at the face...no Stan, you were better than that, much better) and a few scenes which are simply too set-up to be plausible.In the end its not a film that holds the attention, the characters are too unsympathetic to feel any connection with and although there are moments of poetry , as a whole it's a plodding misfire. My apologies to all fans of Miss Moreau - no offence, very few actresses could have made this role work.

"Eva" is based on a novel by James Hadley Chase, the British writer of American "tough-guy" novels. Director Joseph Losey overlays a cryptic story of alienation and obsession, and the beautiful photography makes the life of the film seem simultaneously glamorous and lonely.

But inside this modish story of a not-very-admirable man and the evil woman he falls in love with is a rollicking old noir screaming to be let out, with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer as the femme fatale.

Contemporary Hollywood-style, one-thought-at-a-time storytelling is conspicuously absent here. The audience has to work to connect the dots in this film - there's no directorial hand on the back of your neck, turning your head to look at this road sign, then that, then the other. A requirement of active audience effort was once taken for granted, but is now much more rare and may be an unfamiliar experience for some viewers.

Jeanne Moreau is compulsively watchable (as always) as a woman who thinks, but we rarely know about what. The improbably handsome Stanley Baker has the time of his life acting for once, rather than punching someone's chin every twelve minutes, as in most of his films. Virna Lisi has dignity and consequence as the good girl whose love is never valued enough.

The underlying story of the film is a classic fantasy of male self-justification - man chases the wrong woman, one who treats all men badly because she can. The man lets himself be led around by his privates, he thinks with the wrong part of his body, and then he blames the hash he makes of things on the "evil" woman (see Adam's explanation to God in the Garden of Eden story). Another predessor of the film is Hogarth's The Rake's Progress.

Who the other characters are and what their motivations might be are minor questions - they are peripheral figures who only serve to focus the film on the central issues of male weakness and female inscrutability. The eternal question, "What do women want?", is enough to destroy the unstable male protagonist, and we watch him unravel in the beautifully photographed surroundings of Venice and Rome. The admirable letterbox transfer looks particularly seductive on a big-screen TV.

If you ever wondered what a film might look like that combined "The Blue Angel," "L'Avventura" and "Out of the Past," this is about as close as you'll get. Recommended to all except the most passive viewers.

Truffaut muse Jeanne Moreau was one of the sexiest women in cinema. Her features were unnaturally glamorous: the dark eyes that registered anything but passivity, eyebrows always slightly furrowed, upturned mouth will full, sensuous lips. She's on fire here; thus, her Eva transcends this material. Miss Moreau fills every scene with a physicality that looks almost choreographed yet not rehearsed. She's raw carnality personified. Combining that quality with a careless self-consciousness make it easy for one to see what's missing in today's female actors. Louise Brooks had it. Jessica Lange had it in The Postman Always Rings Twice. But nobody else really. The film itself hasn't held up unless you're a film scholar or part of the intellectual art house crowd. Characters register pain by pressing a cheek against whatever wall comes their way and letting their jaw go slack. A myriad of sixties kitsch fill the screen: white masks, fur blankets, overdubbing, a jazz-scat score, and a fishtank image Mike Nichols must have borrowed for The Graduate. We even see a character face her obsession and say with fervor, "I love you! I love you! I love you!" while they have breakfast on a piazza. I've used the term 'dated' in other reviews and I'm beginning to frustrate myself. It's an easy buzzword (like co-dependent or brilliant); sometimes it has a place but mostly I find it insulting and the wrong word to use for Eva. But the film is intellectual camp.

Jeanne Moreau in Venice, listening to Billie Holiday's Willow Weep For Me while slinking about a bedroom before bathing? Yes, please. She's such a delight, but the story wasn't for me. She plays a tough high-end prostitute more than capable of looking after herself, but the men trying to buy her things to get into her pants and being so blatant about it are yucky at the outset. One of them (the rather bland Stanley Baker) is a writer who gets quite obsessed with her, and despite her telling him not to fall in love with her, naturally does so. The story then takes a page out of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, with her telling him to his face that he's a loser and repeatedly torturing him, and him coming back for more despite getting married to a beautiful young woman (Virna Lisi). It's not a story I care for or can empathize with.

It's great to see Moreau and my heart trilled a little with each close-up, but these characters and their relationship are so unlikeable. Even smaller things in the script are disagreeable. When she tells her backstory, she says she was orphaned at 11 and had to sexually satisfy a married man living upstairs for money, which, even as she impishly says it's fictitious, is still unpleasant. At one point the man in explaining his infidelity to his fiancée tells her "I love all women, 6 to 60," which is also quite creepy. 6??? When Eva laughs at him for falling down, he winds up and belts her in the face, which she takes simply by saying "only my husband can do that." But it's the main story, a man repeatedly coming back to humiliation, that's hard to watch.

The production quality is decent but not exceptional, especially considering the location. It's certainly not helped by the dubbing. Aspects of the story like the plagiarism that comes out or the fate of his wife seem like melodramatic padding. The film is much too long and I didn't care how it was going to turn out. It's worth seeing if you love Moreau or the city of Venice as there are some really beautiful moments for both, but overall, this was a disappointment.

If you fondly remember Jeanne Moreau from Jules et Jim, that alone will make this film well worth seeing. I recall it as a very " early 60's " movie, with not a little incoherence in the plot department. However, Jeanne Moreau's unique presence and "look" really fitted the role she played, and is something of a tour-de-force.