La Fille aux yeux d'or (1961)
Directed by Jean-Gabriel Albicocco

Film Review

Jean-Gabriel Albicocco is most widely recognised today for his film Le Grand Meaulnes (1967), his lush and vivid adaptation of an essential work of French literature by Alain-Fournier, but before this he made his mark with an even more flamboyant work, La Fille aux yeux d'or (a.k.a. The Girl With the Golden Eyes).  Inspired by a short novel of the same title by Honoré de Balzac (from his Thirteen series), this film not only established Albicocco's credentials as a promising auteur (one who was much nearer to the Italian New Wave of Antonioni and Fellini than its already dwindling French counterpart), it also helped to secure the international reputation of his muse and wife, Marie Laforêt, who adopted the film's French title as her soubriquet.  By this time, Laforêt had already garnered attention for her roles in two other prominent films - René Clément's Plein Soleil (1960) and Marcel Moussy's Saint-Tropez Blues (1961) - and a successful singing career was only just over the horizon.

With its wildly extravagant mise-en-scène (which manages to out-do even Orson Welles' The Trial, released the following year) and equally grandiose cinematography (supplied by the director's father Quinto), La Fille aux yeux d'or is a film that positive reeks of early 1960s decadence.  Fellini's similarly themed La Dolce vita (1960) is laughably tame by comparison, and few other films made in France at the dawn of 1960s capture the moment as intensely, as brazenly, as voluptuously as this.  Contrasting with the striking visuals is a relentlessly melancholic guitar score that expresses, with such poignancy, the abject solitariness of the lost souls inhabiting a world filled with stale pleasures but not one sliver of joy. La Fille aux yeux d'or isn't just a film of its time, it is one that boldly anticipates the cultural tsunami that would roll across the West once the decade had got underway and the long years of post-war austerity had finally been exorcised.

It is with astonishing ease that Albicocco transposes Balzac's 19th century tale about a decadent wastrel falling foul of an amour fou to swinging Paris of the 1960s - not the Paris that most of us would recognise, but rather one seen through a badly cracked distorting prism whilst under the influence of psychedelic drugs - a chiaroscuro phantasmagoria woven into a suffocating baroque fantasy.  Albicocco plays with light and shade with greater frenzy than Picasso ever played with colour, and the result is a head-splitting whirlwind of subjective experience that forces you into the tight-fitting shoes of the capital's debauched youth as they lunge from one hedonistic binge to another, constantly seeking the fulfilment that never comes.

Lacking restraint in just about every department except modesty, Albicocco's film is as frustratingly opaque as it is blisteringly perceptive, and if, at times, it looks like a hollow festival of self-indulgent artistry on jet-propelled roller-skates this is because it evokes so completely and so unapologetically the sheer naked vacuity of the life that the post-war generation inherited once materialism and the cult of the individual had arrived, sprouting from the decomposing remains of an imposed morality that had had its day.  In his futile attempt to seek and possess the ideal woman, the film's central protagonist Henri Marsav encapsulates the essence of what we, the children of the Holocaust, would all become - spoiled brats, condemned to lead the emptiest of lives in the most perfect of moral vacuums.  If you are disgusted by La Fille aux yeux d'or this might be because what you are seeing is the truest reflection of yourself.

Film Synopsis

Henri Marsav is a 20-something fashion photographer who revels in hedonistic youth with his circle of equally debauched friends.  Getting blind drunk and abducting pretty girls that take their fancy are how Henri and his friends get their kicks, but sometimes the game isn't worth the hunt.  This is the case of Katia, a model too willing to please - Henri is happy to leave her to his friend Paul.  A more interesting prospect presents itself when Henri returns to his car one night and encounters an attractive young woman he has never seen before.  The girl, wild and mysterious with her eyes of gold, exerts a strange fascination over the compulsive pleasure seeker, and before he knows it Henri has become obsessed with the idea of possessing her.  Little does he know that she is the lesbian lover of a former partner of his, Eléonore, and she has absolutely no intention of giving her up...