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Jeanne Moreau murmuring "je t'aime, je t'aime" in extreme close-up is a sacred image so Louis Malle starts things off right, an elegance of technique carries the title's film noir fatalism to the end. Saturday night and Sunday morning "like a classical tragedy unfolding over 24 hours." The ex-paratrooper in the office building (Maurice Ronet) and the war-profiteering boss (Jean Wall) whose lair at the top must be climbed, a cut from the decisive gunshot gives a secretary's noisy pencil-sharpener. One piece of equipment mars the perfect crime so the executive goes back and is entombed between floors inside the elevator, Moreau as la femme de patron waits in vain at the café. A Bresson treatment of Cronaca di un Amore, nocturnal dazes and sudden downpours, Antonioni returns the favor in La Notte. Meanwhile, a parallel liaison—shopgirl (Yori Bertin) and beau (Georges Poujouly) in the trapped man's car, shooting German tourists and planning a romantic double-suicide only to get an acute hangover from barbiturates. "My generation has other things on its mind." Malle in his feature debut is already a seasoned professional, with early sketches for the doomed drift of Le Feu Follet and the thick youth of Lacombe Lucien. The pall of Indochina and Algiers, the ersatz garden of a motel cabin and the inky void of a police interrogation are all part of his modernist Paris. ("An interesting document if you know how to read it," against this airless construction lies Miles Davis' improvisations.) Alibis come and go but the lady's passion is for the ages, Moreau's triste sultriness finally contemplates tell-tale evidence as a cherished memento. Cinematography by Henri Decaë. With Lino Ventura, Iván Petrovich, Elga Andersen, Félix Marten, Charles Denner, and Jean-Claude Brialy. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |