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Dimming of the will o' the wisp, the dilettante's way out. Louis Malle the directionless virtuoso takes stock, his stand-in is the depressed artiste with an appointment with a Luger. The writer (Maurice Ronet) at the Versailles clinic, ashen, dry, ennui-laden, "completely cured" or so he's been told. No mere pangs but "a single feeling of constant anxiety" for him, his room is a shrine to his own morbidity, littered with newspaper headlines and Marilyn Monroe photographs and the fateful date scribbled on a mirror. One last visit to Paris, a parade of acquaintances, poseurs, reactionaries and addicts to confirm his torments. Fling with the businesswoman (Léna Skerla), lunch with the married chum (Bernard Noël), cigarette with the young "successor" (Bernard Tiphaine). "You and your mediocre certainties!" So death-scented that Jeanne Moreau at her most ravaged dubs him "un cadavre," a brief interlude from art gallery to drug den. (Comments on his appearance add to the miasma of Fitzgeraldian frailty, Babylon Revisited and The Great Gatsby await home.) Drab light at the Latin Quarter and barely illuminated gloom at the Champs-Élysées, the many grayish gradations of a state of mind. "I'm calling it a day. I refuse to grow old." The literary position (cf. La Notte), the torn diary and the shattered cup—fastidiously detached yet ardently confessional, a characteristic Malle contradiction. Elusive sensations "like a snake between stones," the tragedy laid bare to the former flame (Alexandra Stewart), the inability to touch life. It closes with the calmest and saddest of Chekhov's guns, just a period at the end of one long stream-of-consciousness sentence and "an indelible stain." The filmmaker's old mentor in The Devil, Probably shows how it's done. With Hubert Deschamps, Jean-Paul Moulinot, Yvonne Clech, Ursula Kübler, Mona Dol, Pierre Moncorbier, René Dupuy, and Tony Taffin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |