The Lovers (1958)

I mostly enjoyed this film a lot. Certainly it's camera movement and use of deep focus is exemplary. Interestingly, it is only the focal point of the narrative that I found disappointing and over-played. The use of Brahms here strikes me as heavy handed as the use of Satie in Malle's soon-following The Fire Within seemed natural and complimentary. Most scenes struck me as subtly satiric, and I wondered if it wasn't something of an inspiration for The Graduate.

I'll start by saying this is a gorgeous film, with many beautiful scenes and fantastic 'New Wave' direction from Louis Malle. Jeanne Moreau plays a married woman with a disinterested husband (Alain Cuny), and, bored after 8 years of marriage, pursues an affair with a polo player (José Luis de Vilallonga). She does it under the guise of visiting her friend (Judith Magre) in Paris. This get a little ticklish when her husband starts to tire of the charade, and demands that she invite the two of them to dinner at their mansion in Dijon. The romantic tension in the film is palpable, and it's chic and stylish in its exploration of the age old theme of human relationships. There is an additional character who comes on the scene of Moreau's car breakdown (Jean-Marc Bory) who provides the film a voice for criticism about French society and the bourgeois.There is an extraordinary change of pace in what happens that night, but I won't spoil it, and it's best to not know what's coming when seeing this film for the first time. I'll just say that it enters a bit of a dreamlike and surreal haze, but as anyone who has ever been passionately in love will attest, that haze is quite realistic. In one highly charged scene, Moreau's lover goes down on her, which is bit shocking for 1958, a time when Hollywood by contrast was mired in the Hays Code and had married couples sleeping in separate beds. And yet it's tastefully and beautifully done, which is perhaps that's why Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart so famously said of this film that it was not pornography, because "I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." Indeed.There is a lot to love here. Moreau is wonderful, so beautiful and conveying so much emotion with her eyes. The acting is strong throughout, and the film still feels like a 'fresh voice' almost 60 years later. It's very romantic and yet honest at the same time, which is not easy. Great film.

As a twenty-something, I saw this film with my boyfriend of the time, and as soon as it was over, we rushed home to do it ourselves. In the early-to-mid sixties, "Les Amants" was eroticism that was certainly explicit--albeit tastefully explicit, to our naive eyes. Made when Malle was twenty-five, with the young Jeanne Moreau, to the romantic Sextette that Brahams wrote when he was 27, this was the perfect sexy romance for its time and place.I just saw it again, now watching as a sixty-something in an age in which "Les Amants" would probably get an R rating--and a tame one. I'm jaded too. It's hard to feel much sympathy for a desperate housewife of the upper middle class as she battles ennui. But the love sequence is still a knockout. You can't stop to think about it as the lovers, who as yet barely know each other except for their terrific physical attraction, go from garden-to-boat- to bedroom; it's still erotic in its implication. the garden is too lovely to be true, the boat is white and clean, and Moreau wears her pearl necklace throughout, but the message of a woman who has only known pedestrian sex being introduced for the first time to the Real Thing rang a bell with me (I had a similar experience, minus the garden, the pearls and the boat). I sat there bawling my head off-- with nostalgia this time for an unrecoverable experience-- through the whole sequence.But the ending also rings true. What do you do when you come up for air?From one of the interviews on the CD, I learned that the plot was based on an 18th century story, and I can readily see that, just as could see the fin-de-siècle Viennese origin of Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut." In neither case does the contemporary updating of the tales make them any less effective.

What you see here is Jeanne Moreau's famous first filmic female orgasm and director Louis Malle's second feature film. Les amants / The Lovers was at that time a controversial study of bourgeois emptiness and sexual yearnings. The (as widely described) inscrutable Moreau plays a high society wife who is bored by her rich husband, has a lover, smart friends and a daughter. On one night she makes passionate love with a young student of a few hours acquaintance, and leaves it all for a new life.If it now looks too much like an angry young sensualist's movie, the combination of a body language that is highly pleasurable, the soundtrack of Brahms, and the Henri Decaë's velvety monochrome, ravishing photography proves hard to resist. Her second collaboration with director Malle shows once more, what a wonderful screen persona Moreau is: commanding, willful, sultry.