Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d'une femme

Remake of Victor Saville's film based on a Stefan Zweig's short story starring Merle Oberon.

First (and best ) collaboration of director Dominique Delouche (first feature film ) with Danielle Darrieux .

WW1: Alice meets a young German deserter who has fled to Switzerland in a casino where he has just gambled his money away;she becomes his lover and gives him money ;but a gambler will always be a gambler.

It's a delicate wistful movie in which Danielle Darrieux,50 at the time , was not afraid of playing the part of an aging woman (Robert Hoffmann,her co-star was about 30).She would resume the collaboration with Delouche in "Divine" ,a less successful attempt.

The Swiss landscapes are nicely filmed,particularly on the glittering lake.

Delouche was certainly influenced by Jacques Demy and "La Baie Des Anges" ;it was even more obvious in "Divine" .

This is a film tailored by Dominique Delouche for and around Danielle Darrieux. He uses the post-Belle Époque setting of Lake Como, where the terraces and fountains of a great hotel isolates a group of privileged people from the First World War.

Lady Alice (Darrieux) is drawn to a young man, Thomas (Robert Hoffman), by his physical beauty, but also because she realises that he needs help.

She attempts to put him safely in a seedy hotel, but ends up there with him. She is at first transformed from a numb widow into a frivolous lover. Enjoy her unexpected, skipping joy the following morning as she catches the lake ferry and flirts outrageously with the Captain.

"There is a war on, you know," he says when she airily dismisses his request for her passport.

The film is also a bit of a parallel universe in which Lady Alice is the survivor of Madame de... with tributes to Darrieux' 1953 film when she tries on a necklace in the mirror, in the photographs on the shelf, in the snatch of the song "L'amour m'emporte".

And surely we are invited to see parallels with the Darrieux' real life, her ill-advised love affair with Porfirio Rubirosa, their time at Megève, surrounded by war but blind to it because they were happy.

Yet Lady Alice is a woman who knows, "Il ne suffit pas d'être innocent".

Parallels too in her hopeful misjudgement of his character, the attempt to reform him, when the man is self-pitying, addicted and utterly unreliable.

It's a simple story, it perhaps relies too much on Darrieux' facial expressions at times, but is worthwhile for her (of course), for the photography and period atmosphere, and for its ambiguities.