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What a difference a lay makes... The thawing of the bourgeois sphinx is a spectacle modulated not out of Flaubert but of Perrault, Jeanne Moreau in the garden in flowing gown is the most erotic of Sleeping Beauties. The socialite alternates between her Dijon cottage with a stolid husband (Alain Cuny) and Parisian polo matches with a doltish playboy (José Luis de Vilallonga), yet boredom reigns. In drops the plebeian student (Jean-Marc Bory), whose crack about the lady's stalled convertible ("It looks dead, I suggest an operation") is just the kind of elegantly dirty joke savored by Louis Malle. The buildup is all perfumed surfaces, gracefully elongated figures, dialogue at once 19th-century moony and right on the verge of L'Avventura: "Always is a female word ... Poet or pessimist? Archeologist! ... The tragedy Jeanne thought she was in had become a farce." Brahms, swaying tall grass, drifting rowboats and soft-focus moonlight lubricate the amorous fireworks, culminating in a trembling close-up of the heroine (she murmurs in bed while her lover's head disappears below the frame) that's half Ecstasy and half Ninotchka. "Is this a land you invented for me to lose myself in?" "La nuit est une femme." Seeking a frank new lyricism, Malle wisely shares control of the mise en scène with the lugubrious carnal spirit Manny Farber once dubbed "Jeanne Morose," whose undulating-waterbed performance sets the tone for the new decade's wounded arthouse Eros. As dawn breaks and the couple takes the road toward the unknown, it becomes clear that the cause behind the film's scandal wasn't its fleeting nudity, but its nonjudgmental portrayal of a woman willing to leave behind marital and material duties to pursue desire on her own terms. Cinematography by Henri Decaë. With Judith Magre and Gaston Modot. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |