Les Amants (1958) - film review

Jeanne relieves the boredom of her stale marriage to newspaper magnate Henri Tournier by frequent visits to Paris, where she divides her time between her best friend Maggie and her covert lover Raoul.  One day, after one drink too many, Henri orders Jeanne to cancel her next trip to Paris and instead invite her friends to their home, a large country house near Dijon.  Jeanne agrees to the dinner party, but insists on keeping her date with Maggie.  On her way back to Dijon, Jeanne’s car breaks down and she has no option but to accept a lift from a stranger, a handsome young archaeologist named Bernard.  Henri shows his gratitude by inviting Bernard to spend the night at his house.  That evening, when Henri and his other guest have retired, Jeanne and Bernard meet in the grounds and realise that they are in love.  After a night of passion, Jeanne knows that she must leave with Bernard and sacrifice everything she has for the sake of love...

At first sight, Louis Malle’s follow-up to his stylish modernist noir thriller Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958) appears to be nothing more than a conventional bourgeois romantic drama, a familiar tale of marital infidelity that offers few surprises and a sackload of clichés.  Yet surface impressions can be very misleading and anyone familiar with Malle’s work would be surprised if this were not the case.  The plot is one you would expect to find between the rose-scented covers of a Mills and Boon paperback, although it was in fact taken from a short story by the eminent 18th Century writer and diplomat Dominique Vivant (whose main claim to fame is being appointed the first director of the Louvre museum).  The setting, the characters, even the mise-en-scène, all reek of bourgeois complacency, and yet the film is one of Malle’s most subversive and provoked an enormous outcry from scandalised commentators when it was first seen.  Les Amants earned itself notoriety with its groundbreaking love scene, the first time a female orgasm was depicted on the screen (and also cinema’s first allusion to oral sex).  Although this sequence is mild by today’s standards, it earned the film an 18 classification in France and an outright ban in several states in the US.  For the UK release, the love scene had to be trimmed to meet the censorship requirements.  This hue and cry worked to Malle’s advantage - the film went on to become a worldwide hit and established the director’s international reputation.

The screenplay was written by Louise Lévêque, the aristocratic writer who had penned the novel Madame de..., which had been turned into a film by Max Ophüls in the early 1950s.  Like Lévêque, Malle came from an exceptionally privileged background, although his work often belies this fact and reveals a distinct anti-bourgeois, humanist streak.  The fact that Louis Malle found fame just as Truffaut, Godard, et al were beginning to make an impact is what led him to become associated with the French New Wave, although he stands apart as an auteur in his own right.  Malle’s films are conventionally made, having none of the stylistic innovation that we most associate with la Nouvelle Vague, but they distinguish themselves with their subject matter.  Malle is not concerned with the nombrilistic exercise in re-inventing cinema for its own sake, but rather in challenging society’s attitudes to taboo subjects such as illicit sex, depression, death and racial prejudice.  He was every bit as radical as Godard and Rivette, but only in what he said, not how he said it.  With its explicit portrayal of forbidden love, Les Amants brought about its own revolution.  This is the film that knocked down the barricades of prudish restraint and altered cinema’s relationship with sex forever.  

Les Amants was also an important milestone in the career of its lead actress Jeanne Moreau.  Although she had previously starred in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958) and had been appearing in films since the early 1950s, Moreau’s breakthrough only came with her intensely sensual portrayal in this film.  This is the role that led Truffaut to cast her as the femme fatale Catherine in Jules et Jim, her most celebrated part and the one which won her international recognition.  For the rest of her remarkable career, Moreau would often be called upon to play variants of the kind of character she first portrayed in Les Amants - inscrutable and sensual women whose cool, often severe exterior mask the passion and frenzy that lie beneath.  In Les Amants’s famous love scenes, Moreau is captured at her most beautiful, but these also expose the darkness beneath the surface - the trepidation of a gambler who stakes everything on what she knows may well be a losing hand.  More than anything, it is the power of Moreau’s performance, the mystique and subtle ambiguity of her characterisation, that makes this such a potent film.

Cinematographer Henri Decaë brings a Cocteau-esque unreality to the sequence in which Jeanne Moreau and her co-star Jean-Marc Bory take a nocturnal stroll through the grounds of the country house.  We ought to cringe at what, on the face of it, is a characteristically bourgeois depiction of an amorous encounter.  Yet such is the exquisite beauty of Decaë’s composition, so effective is it at conveying the sense of two people falling in love, that it can only enchant us and take us back to that magical scene in Belle et la bête where the evil spell is broken and the Beast wins Beauty’s heart for eternity.  It is only when morning comes and the evening’s enchantment has passed that the fairytale illusion begins to fade.

Jeanne’s hesitation and unease as she embarks on her new life with Bernard tell a great deal, revealing the rocky path that lies ahead.  Will Jeanne’s need for material comfort and status triumph over what may prove to be a mere ephemeral infatuation, or will she be like Beauty, and live happily ever after in the arms of her new beau idéal?  As the clapped-out 2CV drives off down the bumpy country lane, we have a shrewd idea of what lies ahead.  We can hardly fail to see the strings that bind Jeanne to her genteel bourgeois milieu tightening, slowly pulling her back to a life of gracious living, self-esteem and ennui relieved by the occasional amorous fling in Paris.  For those born with a silver spoon in their mouths, how can amour fou possibly compete with amour-propre?  Isn’t it typical of Louis Malle to switch off the camera just as these doubts enter our minds and lead us to anticipate the multiple pile-up that lies around the next bend?

© James Travers 2011

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