Can't believe that there are not more postings on this wonderful film. Having just bought Vol.1 of the Malle collection I've watched it this evening for the first time after many years. I expected it to be dated but it is as fresh and as moving as ever - an evocative love story which, today, comes across as heart breakingly innocent.
shareI agree. This film is wonderful, and so is Jeanne Moreau.
shareIt has been 49 years since I saw this film with my wife in Los Angeles with subtitles. My second wife saw the 2006 film Lady Chatterley's Lover and was very excited about how beautiful it was -- she's anxious to get the DVD. I said, "in that case you might appreciate Les Amants -- from 1958". On this very site I see Google touting Lady Chatterley's Lover 2006 to those who enjoyed Les Amants. Imagine my surprise!!!
shareIt was a box office flop. I don't think most American audiences could accept the idea that one night of passion constituted sufficient justification for leaving one's husband and children.
shareI don't think most American audiences could accept the idea that one night of passion constituted sufficient justification for leaving one's husband and children.Being European, I saw the film yesterday, and I felt that that part of the story line dated the film terribly. Even when the film came out, it surely must have felt as being (too) far fetched. Did viewers 50 years ago not reject what Jeanne did as bordering on irrational to put it mildly? What mother, then and today, would leave her child just like that? After one night of passion? Come on.
I can see the point but sympathise with the many viewers who won't. Do you recall the similar desertion of loving husband and offspring in The Hours? In that film, it is clear that the woman faced no choice. The plot was uncomplicated by a lover, but she was styill a woman escaping a life that was death. In some ways, this at first suggests a fault with Malle's film. But he realistically shows that they are going into the unknown, however 'sure' they feel.
http://comments.imdb.com/user/ur0064493/comments-index?order=date&; summary=off&start=0
good stuff, indeed. It's a great, great film!
shareYou can't really bring any outside views or morals into a Malle film. You also cannot go in with any preconceived notions of what he is trying to say. Jeanne is not the same person as say, Laura from Brief Encounter. She might not be as happy as Laura in her current marriage, might not have the same morals, and must clearly see this new opportunity as a huge step up for her. A journey with Malle is one with moral compass left behind, he just doesn't include any kind of judgmental slant, and this lack of societal limitations brings about a sincere individuality with his characters. Most people would likely not have sex with their mothers either, but he managed to incorporate that subject into one of my favorite films.
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Did viewers 50 years ago not reject what Jeanne did as bordering on irrational to put it mildly? What mother, then and today, would leave her child just like that? After one night of passion?Viewed in this way Jeanne's behaviour would not make sense. It's quite clear from the start of the film that she is longing to be taken away from her life and that she views men as her means of escape. In the 1950's divorce was a most rare possibility for a woman to initiate. This man, who made her laugh in a way that no others seemed able to, enabled her to leave but she was ready for it; he catalysed what was waiting within her.
Fatima had a fetish for a wiggle in her scootshare
It wasn't about one night of passion. It was about making a connection with someone who represented something radically different and new to what she had previously experienced.
The young guy represents a completely different set of values to the culture she is familiar with, and more importantly, is stifled by, and bored stiff by. When they are travelling in the car it is clear that something is developing between them, when his criticism of her way of life, and of her friends might be expected to provoke a defensive reaction from her, instead, she is charmed by this down-to-earth intellectual.
It is about love, specifically, love at first sight, which is made explicit by the dialogue. Love at first sight may be an unfashionable concept now, and maybe it was when the film was made ( I wouldn't know), but nevertheless, this is part of the explanation of why she left.
I think that more people were wanting something more obviously complex from this movie, which is something of an adult fairy tale, but underneath it is a very sharp question waiting to be asked: How much is happiness worth?
This isn't as brilliant as Elevator to the Gallows (the only other Malle I've seen), but Jeanne Moreau is stunning, and the film simply looks devastatingly gorgeous, and it's a beautiful fairy tale about what love should be about: self-discovery.
Ingrid Bergman, mon amour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkI4f_UrKmc
movielover061
I sent this movie to someone Valentine's Day. As I remember the movie, I found it very revealing as a comparison of French and American cultures of the 1950s.
In the end Moreau and her lover escape conformity together much in the way that the Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross's characters escape in the decade later American film of The Graduate. Both sets of characters, the main couple in The Graduate and the Jeanne Moreau character with her young lover, are escaping the smothering confines of convention. The Moreau character is no mother to the child anyway. She has only pretended to be a mother to satisfy the loveless demands of a phony society where she has been a trophy wife. Is she a bad person or only human?
The American movies of 1950-1958 were soap operas about the unhappy lives of those who did not conform. I paired this movie, The Lovers, with the Far From Heaven movie of a few years ago for my gift. I think it dealt with the same issues in an interesting look back to the era.
Nowadays, Americans just need a few drinks.
Update: Hawk fan says bathroom sex scandal "ruined my life"
STACI HUPP • [email protected] • November 26, 2008
A Carroll woman who was caught having sex in the men's room at an Iowa Hawkeye football game in Minneapolis last weekend says she’d had so much wine before kickoff that she doesn’t remember walking into the restroom, the man she had sex with in a stall, or when the police opened the door.
What Lois Feldman, 38, will remember is the humiliation afterward.
“It’s ruined my life,” she said through tears today. “Not just the incident but the press.”
Feldman, a married mother of three, has been the target of Internet jokes and prank telephone calls today. She was fired this morning from an assisted living center, where she had been an administrator.
Feldman said her husband, Kelly, has been supportive. She said he faults himself for not going with her when she left her seat to use the restroom before halftime.
“I don’t know what happened,” Lois Feldman said. “But I don’t deny that it did happen because obviously there are police reports.”
Police ticketed Feldman, 38, and Ross Walsh, 26, of Linden for indecent conduct Saturday night.
A security guard who said he saw the two having sex through a gap in a men’s restroom stall flagged down campus police, according to the police report.
By the time an officer arrived, about a dozen people were cheering and laughing in the bathroom while Feldman and Walsh were inside the stall, the report said.
The officer pushed his way through the crowd, opened the door and separated Feldman and Walsh, the report said.
Police described both Feldman and Walsh as upset, drunk and uncooperative.
Chuck Miner, deputy chief of the University of Minnesota police department, said officers tracked down Feldman’s husband.
“I’m not sure how they made contact with her husband, but they needed her husband to help identify her” because she’d given the wrong middle name.
Miner said police didn’t measure the blood-alcohol level of Feldman or Walsh. Asked to respond to Feldman’s claim that she was too drunk to recall the incident, Miner said: “That’s probably an accurate statement.”
Feldman said she’d never met Walsh.
“I don’t know who this man is,” she said today. “I just found out his name in the paper last night.”
Walsh wasn’t immediately available for comment.
Carroll, Feldman’s hometown, is about 60 miles northwest of Linden, where Walsh lives.
Feldman, who describes herself as a light drinker, drank wine at the home of family friends before the football game.
She said she doesn’t remember how much she drank, but the party’s hosts refilled her glass each time it was low “so I’m sure I drank a lot.”
Feldman said her husband later told her he’d tried to talk her out of the game because she was intoxicated.
“He said I didn’t realize it was that bad,” she said.
Feldman said her husband accompanied her to the game, but their friends stayed home.
She said she remembers sitting in the stands one moment and the next “being slammed around by a cop and screaming.”
“Apparently I was panicked and very uncooperative,” she said.
Feldman said she “ran away” from her husband the Metrodome after the incident.
She said a woman she didn’t know offered her a ride home about 11 p.m.
Feldman said she gave her husband’s cell phone number to the woman, who called Kelly Feldman for directions to the couple’s hotel.
Lois Feldman said her attorney has encouraged her to fight the ticket.
“He feels I was taken advantage of in my state of mind,” she said. “This is not me. We’re a very good family. This shouldn’t happen.”
Miner, the campus police officer, said fighting the indecent conduct charge could be a long shot.
“It’s spelled out in the law in Minnesota that intoxication is not a defense to any crime,” he said.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20081126/NEWS/81126006
http://byronik.com
Talk about outdated --- three justices of the Supreme Court managed to accept that it was okay to BAN the showing of this film as illegal obscenity!
shareI visited video store in Chongqing China on 24th of May 2008 and found this Criterion release "bootlegged" with exact Criterion box, has Chinese under title and same on top of "A Film by Louis Malle" some Chinese on back of sleeve!
Did some one say title was released 18 May here in USA! DVD's sure travel fast, Purchase price in Chongqing China was less than $2.00 for exact copy!
yeah this is rather empty board for such a good filmWhen there's no more room in hell, The dead will walk the earth...
I didn't enjoy the film as much as some of Malle's earlier films but I agree that it is fresh in terms of the photography and direction. I've found this to be the case with all his early films.
Fatima had a fetish for a wiggle in her scootshare
Very underrated film for sure.
shareQuite scandalous for the 1950s, but rather tame in this respect today.
I liked some of the scenery, particularly that of the land along the river where the car breaks down.
On the other hand, it's amusing to see the lead flaunt her underarm hair.
I took it as a satire, actually, of the pretentious, vacuous upper class. The archaeologist, whom they seem to think is an architect even though he tells them more than once, likes no one in that group except the girl, but he will come to dislike her pretty soon when it becomes clear she is of that class and won't be able to live day to day without all its conventions.
She seems rather promiscuous and thoughtless to say the least. Not only does she betray promises, she doesn't even bother to think through what she is doing.
The scene of the last night is weird. Wouldn't there be a whole lot of talking about everything before making such a decision? I don't recognize such people. If they really are like that, they are of no interest to me.