L'ennui

This movie is pure torture for the viewer. But it is extremely important as well. It reflects on the power relationship between men and women. Power is exercised by sex. The erect male member reduces the woman to a slave. Here the young girl reverses the process by simply ignoring it. All all-consuming vagina turns the power relationship around. He wants to control her, to own her - not only her body but also her mind. She gives him her body but also utilizes his body for her needs. When he is unable to get control of her, he loses control of his own life. I'm glad to have watched this movie but I surely won't watch it again.

Very French film in which a jaded, self-centred philosophy professor becomes embroiled in a physically consuming, but emotionally vacant, relationship with a blank young girl. Unpleasant, claustrophobic and sharply humorous, it boasts strong performances from all its cast. But eventually the film's focus, as narrow as that of its central character, starts to become a little wearing. Not wholly successful, but interesting nonetheless.

When you adapt a work by Alberto Moravia to the screen, you know that human detachment, alienation or themes thereof are going to dominate.

That's what happens in 'L'Ennui' -- characters driven by excess, searching for the unsearchable or the unreachable. The ambiguity of the word 'ennui' fits very well: in English translation, the word can mean not only boredom but also human emptiness. This is what I believe director Cedric Kahn was aiming for, and he's certainly on target.

This is a descent into an obsessive abyss by Martin, played by Charles Berling with such frenetic neuroticism that he all but leaps off the screen. He lives and suffers through the lives of others. He meets Cecilia, a 17-year-old artist's model, stunningly portrayed by Sophie Guilleman. Martin asks questions about the artist, who died shortly after an obsessive love affair with Sophie. Despite his extensive intellectual training in philosophy (a Moravia-Kahn 'in-joke' here), Martin cannot fathom the emotional emptiness of Cecilia, who is a character straight out of, well, the existential literature of Moravia and Camus (Cecilia reminded me of the latter's Mersault in 'L'Etranger,' a classic study of human detachment).

Martin asks Cecelia endless questions about emotional matters, but she cannot answer them. She only understands transient forms of pleasure (never 'happiness'), and her laissez-faire attitude drives Martin into increasing levels of madness. He thinks he loves her, but he has no understanding of love at all, and cannot find the centre of Cecilia's amiable indifference. He screams about 'possessing' her, as if she were a commodity. She neither loves nor hates him; she is simply neutral, which Martin cannot grasp.

This is a brilliant work on a difficult subject, although it's perhaps about 20 minutes too long. Slowly and meticulously, Kahn unpeels the layers of the endless human dilemma called love.

Once again, the French have delivered a film that just wouldn't see the light of day in Hollywood. I can hear the producers in LaLaLand now: who wants to pay for a film that focuses on a basic philosophical problem: the nature of human existence? Fortunately, we can still see these kinds of films, but they'll never come from Hollywood.

Based on the novel of Alberto Moravia, "L'Ennui" tells us the story of a philosphy teacher (Charles Berling) who, just separated from his wife, meets the young and buxom Cecilia, former model of a painter who died making love to her. As their relationship grows, we fall with Berling into despair (when he is unable to quit her even if he wants to) and even jealousy. The famous scholar cannot find relief in his knowledge, nor in his irritated former wife and is therefore condemned to wander alone, following this woman, directly out from a Renoir painting, he love and despise at the same time and his depiction is really living.

I came across this movie unexpectedly while watching TV late at night. This is probably the best context you can watch this movie in, as fairly light entertainment, with a story I can generally relate to, a pretty lead actress and a frequency of love scenes that is characteristic only of French art house or Californian porn movies. As a serious film though, "L'ennui" does not manage to pull it off -- probably the classic case of a good book being transformed into a lesser movie. The male character comes across as a schoolboy high on testosterone, not the philosophy teacher he is supposed to be (incidentally a position that exists only in French movies where no one ever has to do any real 9 - to - 5 work), the sex scenes in all their explicitness are curiously prudish (the lovers always appear to do it fully dressed and panting as if they had just completed the Ironman contest), and Cécilia's part is just too one - dimensional. Nevertheless, I found the movie entertaining, and it really made me want to read the book (by Alberto Moravia). And you can't say that about too many movies nowadays, can you?