MartinHafer This film is the story of a bored wife and mother (Jeanne Moreau). She lives in a lovely manor home filled with servants in the country. However, she is unhappy and her marriage is without passion. She and her husband sleep in separate bedrooms and she is bored with life. For a while, she deals with it by taking frequent trips to Paris--where she takes a lover. Yet, deep down, she's still bored. Then, out of the blue, she meets another man quite by accident--and they spend a night making love in her home--while her husband, lover and best friend sleep.Back in the late 1950s when it was released, this film created quite a furor in the US. Because of its amoral plot involving a married woman having multiple affairs and showing nudity, it was considered obscene by many and eventually made it to the Supreme Court several years later to decide on its decency. In a landmark case, it was not considered indecent and it led the way to more explicit films being shown in the US in subsequent years. When you see it today, however, you'd never suspect any of this, as the film has almost no nudity at all--and if you are seeing it hoping for some sort of cheap thrill, you are bound to be disappointed. I saw one review that said today it would get an R-rating--heck, I could even imagine it receiving a PG-13. Yes, times have really changed.As far as what I thought of the film, it's really a mixed bag for me. While some can look past the moral problems with the film, I couldn't. It wasn't that the sex scene bothered me--but that the main character seemed like a spoiled child. You see her put nothing into her marriage and instead of dealing with life responsibly, she screws around. It's not that she's immoral--it's more like she's amoral--with no compass to guide her or sense of responsibility or regret. And, the way the film is constructed, it appears to condone and possibly encourage these behaviors. It's sad, as the film ends on a happy note--like life will be great with her running off with a man she hardly knows. I predict in real life, in 97% of cases like these, the woman STILL will find herself bored and might eventually realize that much of the problem is within.Now aside from my moralistic views on the film, I cannot simply dismiss the film because I didn't like the characters (and now that I think about it, I didn't like a single one of them). Artistically speaking, the film was quite brilliant. Louis Malle managed to take a threadbare story and stretch it out to 90 minutes without it becoming dull. Great cinematography, music and acting really carried the film. And, I must add that although there is almost no nudity, the sex scene is highly erotic and exceptionally well made. It managed to make adultery SEEM quite beautiful. And, because of this and its importance to US law, it makes for a must-see experience for cinephiles.By the way, on the Criterion disc is an interesting special feature on the US release. While it's just various clips and a bit of text, seeing the posters and lobby cards for the American release was funny--and a bit sad. You'd swear that the film was MEGA-hot and full of hot, steamy sex based on these print ads--which it certainly is NOT. I am sure many seeing the film went home very disappointed.

falquizo Paris in the 1950s. Film opens with Jeanne & Maggy, two glamorous high society aristocrats, watching a polo game, cheering the star player, the equally glamorous society page poster man Raoul Flores. Later, cozy snuggling between Raoul and Jeanne who, we learn when she goes home, is married to another man -- a prominent newspaper publisher, Henri. Over dinner, we observe quickly that Jeanne and Henri's marriage has been on deep freeze for sometime inside that capacious, ornately furnished countryside mansion. Henri, more or less convinced of Jeanne's affair with Raoul, insisted on having Jeanne invite Maggy and the polo player for the weekend. On her way back from Paris that weekend Jeanne's sports car breaks down. She's given a ride by archaeologist Bernard, definitely proletariat, definitely more comfortable studying rocks from diggings than at the polo field. Henri invites Bernard to stay for the weekend with Raoul and Maggy. At dinner Bernard shown to be an obvious outsider of this group. After everyone goes to bed, Jeanne wanders out into the night in her white, diaphanous nightgown, starting the forty-minute final sequence, the heart of the movie. This is the mildly sensuous moonlit epiphany for Jeanne that true love still can happen. (This sequence was deemed "shockingly erotic" in 1958 when the movie was released, becoming the main reason for calls for censorship, if not outright banning, in many countries). In a long sequence of lyrical black and white, day-for-night shots of shadows in the moonlight, a long walk on a vast field of shrubs and flowers, delicate embraces on a cozy boat floating unaided on a stream, Jeanne falls for Bernard's non-aristocratic, nonhigh-society, proletariat charms. Maybe it is the moonlight, or Bernard's open collar, working-archaeologist shirt, or his 2-cylinder mini-car, or the portentous bat that flew into the room when they were dining, but at the break of dawn, Jeanne decides to leave everything, including her sleeping daughter (another reason which shocked the critics and the Catholic church into condemning this movie) and drive away with Bernard into a new day aborning. (As far as I can remember this is the first movie I know where the central characters, at the fade-out, ride into the sunrise instead of into the sunset. One extra point for the then 25-year old Louis Malle). This movie has acquired its "classic status" for several reasons: It was a notable (and controversial!) work from a young director who was just starting to get noticed (Malle's fifth movie, his second for 1958). It portrayed succinctly the phoniness of the affluent as it showed a portrait of a woman confined within the rituals of her social status and then acting on her sudden feeling to get out. It presented a sex scene considered bold and shocking at that time (Jeanne's orgasm shown only through a close-up of her trembling hand is I think a clever idea from Malle). And it has Jeanne Moreau. (Although for me, anything with Jeanne Moreau is automatically on my personal "classic" list). Even by today's standards I think this is a very well-made movie if only for the subtlety with which Malle presented how these characters show the spectrum of their raw feelings. Moreau is "on every frame" (Malle's words from a 1994 interview) and perfectly so. She shows the build-up in Jeanne's simmering feelings so flawlessly, we actually feel the tension of when it's going to explode. Magre is pure delight as the fully-enjoy-the-moment Maggy. De Villalonga captures perfectly the unctuous charms of someone who's enraptured with his own image, endlessly watching and listening to himself in his own head. Cuny is admirably subtle in showing Henri as someone who has really stopped caring a long time ago, just enjoying watching these people make fools of themselves, eventually to choke on their own flirtations. Note his stiff indifference watching Bernard drive away with Jeanne. In the Moreau performances I've seen, I think this is one of her finest. In her every movie, the main tension is her eyes -- no one really knows what's going on behind that hypnotic stare. Love, passion, hatred, murder, tenderness, bewilderment? We always have to wait for the end of the movie. Some clever prefiguring clues Malle gives us: The bat flying in during their dinner causing a brief consternation -- their fortress has been breached, their aristocracy is not invulnerable anymore. Bernard's mini-car, slow but unstoppable in the highway -- stability, simple and quiet persistence. Bernard freeing the fishes from Henri's traps -- obviously about Jeanne. Excellent, luminous restoration from Criterion of this stunningly photographed black and white film by Henri Decae. Extras include two interviews from Malle and one from Jeanne Moreau. ##

danielhsf Louis Malle's Les Amants is the most romantic film ever made. Screw subjectivity and critical judgment. I've just come off fresh from seeing it, and, in the spirit of the film, I'll let my excitement wash over me instead of letting it die down to see it coolly. Seeing it gave me one of those precious moments, moments where you gasp and go oh-my-god, disbelieving your eyes that cinema could go to places like this, and make you feel things you never felt were possible in fiction.Buried within the Optimum Releasing of the Louis Malle box set, but it emerges the most deafeningly romantic, even when compared to the already celestial ending of the more famous Elevator to the Gallows. Its blissed out view on happiness makes it impossible to attach any critical adjectives to it; it requires us to suspend all thinking faculties and just go with that one powerful emotion.It's amazing how it turns what could've looked like a cover of a chick romance novel into something this beautiful. Henri Decae, who almost single-handedly created the first images of the New Wave, literally sets the screen aglow in ecstasy, painting the two lovers in a heavenly light in that pivotal centerpiece, which is one of the greatest moments of cinema, bar none. Even Jean Vigo's L'Atalante holds nothing on this. (There will be spoilers from hereon, and I would urge you to stop reading this paragraph if you've not seen the film. The joy of discovery in this film is so much more than any other film I've experienced, that I'm wholly convinced that one should experience this as fresh as a virgin.) Stripped of their daily pretenses and graces, the two lovers traverse a God-made Eden, becoming simply Man and Woman and reuniting again, several millenia after the First Man and First Woman were expulsed from paradise. When Jeanne Moreau takes Jean-Marc Bory's hand and asks him 'Is this the land you created for me to lose myself in?', the gaze is sealed and the viewer can do nothing but share in their passion. The two lovers become such eminent symbols of love, sex, and happiness that it's hard to imagine anything more sensual and erotic than this, especially when compared to the fully colored and fully exposed sex symbols of today. They belong to an era removed from any other, not the era that the film was made in, but a black-and-white, pristine era that exists only in cinema, one in which true love still exists without the moorings of reality.And the decided lack of moorings in this film is what makes it so bewitching. Whether it's the fleeting white horse or the eyes of the beautiful beautiful Jeanne Moreau, the film doesn't look back, but indulges fully in the moment, that moment of sensuousness. It is so fitting that the film should be called Les Amants, because anything else would be pretension - the lovers become the lovers of any era, any millennium, by their love alone they have been elevated to the great lovers that have long passed. They transcend being, nature, rules and become one - spirits entwined - with a world that is beyond the tangible, such that any rational reasoning will not be understanding. It's a magical world, a fantasy world, a world that is as unreal as we want it to be real. And this world, the film proposes, can only be reached through a temporary moment of love, un-selfish, immaterial, illogical, and unquestioning love. And when you're able to give yourself in, together with the film, it suddenly becomes so clear and not that unreal anymore.At the risk of sounding like a nut, I just wanted to recommend this film to everyone who thought that this century has made us cynical. Cinema, which began and evolved with this century, has rarely stepped out of its time so gloriously that it becomes a monument, a structure of those classical (and probably impossible) days. It is the single most ravishingly beautiful moment in the history of cinema.

SONNYK_USA The legendary French actress Jeanne Moreau shows why even at this early stage of her career she was destined to become one of the greats (along with tyro-director Louis Malle).Perfect film for chickflickers as the plot line revolves around a married woman who can't decide between her loveless marriage, her playboy lover, or perhaps the next stranger she meets.Still stands up after all these years and yes it's been re-struck in its original 35mm widescreen form (in gorgeous BLACK & WHITE, too)!NOTE: If you live in NYC there is a full Louis Malle retrospective going on thru July 19, 2005 and this film is being screened today, tomorrow, and June 29 with a gorgeously restored black and white print at the Walter Reade theater.