Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray (1962) - film review

A country in Asia is being ravaged by war.  A young pilot named Pierre is flying over a village where soldiers and civilians are caught in a bloody onslaught.  As his plane comes in to attack, Pierre cannot takes his eyes off the frightened face of a little girl who is hiding under a tree...  When he comes to after crashing his plane, Pierre finds himself in hospital, at a town called Ville d’Avray, near Paris.  His wounds have healed but he suffers from severe memory loss.  Madeleine, the nurse who has tendered to Pierre’s injuries for many months, has fallen in love with him, but Pierre is ambivalent about their relationship.  He has difficulty fitting back into society and seems to prefer his own company.  One evening, whilst he is at the train station watching the people go by, Pierre sees a man with a little girl who is crying because her father is going to leave her for good in a Catholic orphanage.  So strong is Pierre’s emotional bond with this little girl, Françoise, that he visits her every Sunday, pretending to be her father so that he can take her for a walk in the country.  A close relationship develops between Pierre, who has the mind of a child, and Françoise, who knows more than she should for someone of her age.  It is not long before people in the town begin to see something unnatural in Pierre’s interest in the little girl...
© Willems Henri (Brussels, Belgium)

Exploring with consummate tenderness the relationship between a grown man and a young girl, Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray (a.k.a. Sundays and Cybele) takes us into an area of human experience which cinema has traditionally given a wide berth, and not without reason.  Adapted from a controversial novel by Bernard Eschassériaux (who collaborated on the screenplay), the film was groundbreaking when it was made but it is perhaps even more provocative today, after a decade in which a swathe of high profile paedophiliac atrocities have dominated the news headlines, engendering a universal paranoia over relationships between adults and children.  The power of this film - the most significant work from director Serge Bourguignon - is that it avoids making any kind of profound moral or social point but merely concerns itself with telling a heartrending story of doomed friendship, allowing us to draw our own conclusions.  It is a film that compels us to reflect on our prejudices and consider whether these may possibly be as socially harmful as the things that fuel them.  Can it really be good for children to grow up in a world in which adults are chronically afraid to befriend them?

Whilst the film uses some of the familiar stylistic motifs of the French New Wave (use of real locations, naturalistic performances, sparse music, Henri Decaë’s achingly lyrical cinematography), it stands apart and, through its visual simplicity, achieves a far greater sense of reality, mainly because it avoids most of the distracting artifices employed by Godard, Rivette, et al.  The acute mental disorientation of the main adult protagonist (Pierre) is vividly conveyed by some sophisticated camera positioning and editing, blurring the boundary between real and imaginary experiences in a way that emphasises the vulnerability of the character as he struggles to regain a foothold on the adult world.  Other passages reflect the naivety and emotional turbulence of the child Françoise, and these bring a sublime purity, almost divine quality to her burgeoning relationship with Pierre.  What the two main characters have in common is an inability to engage with the real world, and so what we see is two people who create for themselves an alternative world which no one else can enter and cause them harm - or so they believe.  The exquisite poignancy of the sequence in which the two share their last moments of happiness, like infants experiencing their first Christmas, makes the film’s tragic ending all the more cruel.  It is an ending that is both predictable and highly symbolic, an inevitable consequence of the prevailing social norms which make no allowance for deviancy, no matter how innocent it may be.
 
Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray is one of those rare films that challenges our prejudices head-on, not in an overtly provocative way, but with its tender, intensely humane handling of a delicate subject.  Hardy Krüger and Patricia Gozzi are superb as the two main characters.  Both bring such conviction and emotional realism to their portrayals (of Pierre and Françoise respectively) that you cannot help ending up feeling there is nothing unnatural in their character’s relationship - they are just two human beings who, cast adrift in an unsympathetic world, nurture a beautiful friendship, a particular kind of love that will restore meaning and colour to their lives.   The ambiguity of the relationship is subtly played upon and there are a few fleeting moments when our ugliest prejudices are provoked, when we suspect the relationship may be heading into unseemly territory.  However, our darker anxieties are never rewarded and we are left feeling almost ashamed to see our own sick imaginings reflected in the beauty of an unsullied friendship.

Given the film’s controversial subject matter, it is hardly surprising that Bourguignon had immense difficulty finding a distributor in France, even after it had been awarded two (albeit lesser) prizes at the Venice Film Festival.  Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray was only widely seen in France after it proved to be a box office hit in the United States and Japan and had won the 1962 Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film.  In spite of some vicious reviews (including an explosion of invective in the pages of the esteemed Cahiers du cinéma), the film proved to be popular in France, attracting an audience of 1.7 million.  Bizarrely, it soon fell into obscurity and has scarcely been heard of since, no doubt because it concerns itself with a subject that today’s society lacks the emotional maturity and moral sophistication to cope with.  Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray is a film that cries out to be rediscovered, not only because it is a potent piece of drama that is crafted with considerable artistry and sensitivity, but also because it may help us to regain a more balanced perspective on the thorny issue of child-adult relationships, the most problematic taboo of our era.

© James Travers 2011

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