Les Amants (The Lovers) is another of the Louis Malle CC films I’ve picked up before the DVD shop got harmonized for the Olympics. They say this is the film that made Jeanne Moreau into a star. She had already been famous before this (1958), most notably as the youngest woman to ever become a full-time member of Comedie Francaise.
On the face of it, the film is about the quandaries faced by the unfaithful bourgeois wife. Can she keep the secret from her husband? Will she elope or run away with her lover?
The premise gets unexpectedly complicated when Jeanne meets yet another man in the movie, and (spoiler alert!) runs off with the third. Bernard, the man she runs off with, is from the same bourgeois milieu as Jeanne’s family and friends, but has a marked antipathy for them. He describes her husband as a “bear” and describes her best friend Maggie and her ilk as “horrible people.”
What’s strange is that she ends up running off with Bernard. You don’t really know why they fall in love, at least there is no psychological realism to it unles you consider love and first sight to be something real. There’s an accidental rendezvous at night. Bernard says “it’s you,” as if they were destined to meet in the moonlight that night. At first she resists, and like most good girls, puts up a bit of a fight before relinquishing. The film supposedly broke the taboos of on-screen eroticism, and perhaps that’s true if you think about the fact that it was released in 1958/9. Some movie theater in Ohio had obscenity order placed on it for showing the film and it took the Supreme Court until 1968 to overturn it. But then again, that’s Ohio. I was a bit surprised to see Jeanne and Bernard making out in the boat by moonlight, and even more surprised when they get back to the mansion and start taking off each other’s clothes. You don’t see more than that, so the whole thing seems tame by today’s standards. Still, it was romantic in its way. I just don’t know if I really bought the whole romance. It just came out of nowhere and I suppose that she was tired of these staid, groomed bourgeois men and wanted a younger, more intellectual and seemingly more virile man like Bernard. But she doesn’t beat around the bush. The affair doesn’t drag on for years. They leave the very next morning. She packs a few things, they get in the car and leave. Everyone watches them as the car drives away.
I’m not sure what to say about the film: I loved the film for what I got to see of the life of the provincial bourgeoisie in France (Dijon is where the story takes place). Everything looks spectacular in black-and-white. You see those typical French country roads lined with tall trees. You see the provincial mansions and manors, with their huge verandas and gardens. You see the beautifully decorated insides as well.
Jeanne Moreau is the center of the film, and she is excellent. The idea that someone could be unhappy in life and love, try extramarital affairs and THEN find someone else, by chance (she meets Bernard when her car breaks down)—is, in some way, extremely romantic. But putting this on film and making it not seem cheesy is a challenge indeed. When they drive away from Jeanne’s home, the reality of what they’ve done dawns on them. You see in their faces. Even Bernard, who through their night-long courtship had always seemed to be the prime mover behind their decisions，seems to have his doubts. It would have been interesting to see how these lovers ended up, but that would have involved another movie. The point of Les Amants is not to be descriptive and epic in that way。 The point of the movie is are the elisions and ellipses, the things that are clouded in ambiguity and shadow.
