First effort by Jean-Claude Guiguet ,a true UFO in the sky of the seventies French cinema; directing may remind you of Bresson in its asceticism ,or more likely his disciple Gerard Blain but ,as far as sexuality is concerned, the characters (the mother,both boys and the sister) seem to be out of a Tennesse Williams' play.
Camille got a raw deal ;he has severed all links with his large family , fleeing a brute of a father ;with a rudimentary education ,he tried odd jobs and finally wound up in Paris in a job generally reserved for girls :some kind of au pair boy who would work in his own country and whose role is rather vague in the service of Madame Courtray ,a refined divorced woman whose son Pierre leads a cloistered life in his bedroom .
The characters ' motives remain vague; the boy ,although his childhood has been as unfortunate as it can be , has no class consciousness ...he makes the best of what he's got,never calls into question the social injustice .It's his employer ,the wealthy woman ,who tells so to the judge : "he was born on the wrong side of the laws;he does not make them ,he 's subjected to them" .There's no explanation for his arson , and the rape is perhaps only the straw that broke the camel's back ; although there's short male frontal nudity , Camille never has sex :when he meets his estranged sister who ,too ,fleed from the family home,she's become a prostitute :when they meet in a cafe ,they only speak of their rare sweet memories of a stolen childhood , mistreated at home and at school ; the boy had a mistress he was fond of and the moment when he recites La Fontaine' s "le corbeau et le renard " fable shows that ,in his subconscious ,he may regret culture eluded him :social determinism.
In direct contrast with him , one has Madame Courtray : she seems totally fulfilled , chooses her lovers (Nicolas Silberg ,de la comedie française,in a single scene) ,travels to Italy and does not have to earn her crust ;however there's a fly in the ointment: her only child ,a boy , does not want to go out of his room anymore :perhaps she's afraid he might be gay ("I'd have preferred a girl",mother says, when she welcomes her employee),but the relationship between Camille and Pierre remains chaste ,even though a certain attraction grows on them :"I hate my mother" Pierre's cri du coeur may suggest an over possessive mother , par excellence Tennessee William's character.
Madame Courtray and her protégé may also remind you of some Williamsesque young man/older woman still attractive but seeing time passing her by, pair.
As her son hates her ,she's perhaps looking for an ersatz :she actually mothers him , nurses him after he was beaten up by hoodlums ;at the same time ,she probably gets an eyeful when he's stark naked in front of her .
"Les belles manières" is a desperate movie ; there's no future for the characters,be they dead or half-dead ; it's not a very accessible work , but it goes off the beaten track in the routine French cinema of the late fifties .
Jean-Claude Guiguet's sophomore effort ," quartier Saint-Martin" ,although commercially uncompromising in spite of graphic sex scenes, was not as fascinating as his first one.
Emmanuel Lemoine, who plays the unfortunate boy , died in 1992 ;he was only
28.
