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Otto Preminger's goal is to transmute Françoise Sagan's confessional subjectivity into a deepening objectivity, also to give a second chance to critics who missed the boat on Saint Joan. "Limbo with father," a silvery pall hangs over Paris to match the glassiness of the teenaged heroine (Jean Seberg), while dancing in a nightclub she meets the camera's gaze and recalls her tale. A Technicolor past on the Riviera, a continuous holiday of champagne and casinos for the widowed libertine (David Niven) and his pixie daughter. The sunburned mistress (Mylène Demongeot) is replaced by the godmother (Deborah Kerr), whose "depth and stability and wholesomeness" threaten to pop the carefree bubble. A child's gambit, a lingering wound. "We're on the brink of a tantalizing abyss. Do I jump or not?" English and American actors in a Viennese view of French life, for the benefit of the Italian perspective just around the corner. Postcard vistas position Seberg in a crimson one-piece swimsuit against cobalt sea and sky, the camera cranes up during the sidewalk café dance to turn the social whirl into a maelstrom. Vexed by daddy's usurper, she scampers to her bedroom to stick pins into her doll, later on she celebrates her devirginization by nervously lighting the wrong end of a cigarette "An invisible wall made of memories" (cf. Bergman's Summer Interlude), a certain Kästner strand, a matter of "serious" versus "casual," as befits the great heir of Lubitsch. Kerr's discovery in the woods is brilliantly staged as a distorted game of hide-and-seek, the telling image has a posh car at the bottom of a beachside ravine. The weeping Cocteau under the credits becomes at the close the ultimate Preminger angel face, a CinemaScope mirror of a mask dissolving in cold cream and tears. Cinematography by Georges Périnal. With Geoffrey Horne, Walter Chiari, Martita Hunt, and Juliette Gréco.
--- Fernando F. Croce |