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Overview
Le Beau mariage is a French romantic film drama first released in 1982,
directed by Eric Rohmer.
The film stars Béatrice Romand, André Dussollier, Féodor Atkine, Arielle Dombasle and Huguette Faget.
It has also been released under the title: A Good Marriage.
Our overall rating for this film is: very good.
Synopsis
Sabine is a 25 year old student in art history at Paris
University. She is currently having an affair with a married man,
Simon, but she suddenly decides to put an end to the relationship when
she grows tired of the incessant phone calls from her lover’s wife and
children. Declaring her intention to find a husband of her own,
she heads back to her home town of Le Mans. At a wedding
reception, Sabine’s best friend Clarisse introduces her to a successful
young lawyer named Edmond. In an instant, Sabine decides
that Edmond is the man she will marry, but he disappears before she has
an opportunity to get her hooks into him. Convinced that Edmond
will make the ideal husband, Sabine begins a relentless campaign of
seduction, ringing his office repeatedly and luring him back to Le Mans
on the smallest pretext. What she has not allowed for is the
possibility that Edmond may have no intention of getting married...
Film Review
The second of Eric Rohmer’s Comédies
et proverbes, Le Beau marriage
is one of the director’s cruellest and most playful films, an
insightful chamber piece which mocks the tendency that we all have to
build castles in the air and let our imagination rule our head and our
heart. The film takes its cue from La Fontaine’s well-known fable
of The Milkmaid and the Pot of Milk
("Quel esprit ne bat la campagne? Qui ne fait châteaux en
Espagne?" / "What mind doesn’t wander over meadows? Who does not build
castles in Spain?"). As in the famous fable, the heroine - a
strong-willed arts student with some very curious ideas about feminism
- constructs for herself an elaborate fantasy which, inevitably, comes
crashing about her ears when she realises the extent of her
delusion. We may laugh at Sabine’s naivety and
her artless attempts at social climbing, but her ultimate fate
engages our sympathies and we take comfort from the sly coda which
offers the prospect of a far happier outcome, not in wonderland, but in
the real world.
Romand’s Sabine and Dombasle’s Clarisse make a striking contrast, and it is through this contrast that Sabine’s folly is exposed to great effect. For Sabine, Clarisse represents the acme of womanhood, happily married to a wealthy man and able to indulge her artistic interests, freed from the burden of having to earn her own wage to supplement the household income. Of course, Clarisse’s apparent freedom is illusory and she sees her marriage for what it truly is, an unnecessary stricture imposed on her by society, or rather the bourgeois stratum of society to which she so evidently belongs. Sabine does not see the limitations of Clarisse’s existence, she sees only the perceived benefits of being a kept woman. Her ideas of marriage are as muddled and absurdly childish as her views on feminism, so the learning curve she subjects herself to as she goes after her idea of connubial bliss will inevitably be a steep and painful one. But, as we see from the film’s ending, the experience was well worthwhile. Wasn’t it Jane Fonda (that well-known one-woman feminist movement and patron saint of Lycra) who popularised the phrase: there’s no gain without pain? © James Travers 2002-2011 Write a review for this film... User Comments
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Credits
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