Louis Malle | Les Amants (The Lovers) / 1958

from darkness into light

by Douglas Messerli

 

Louise de Vilmorin (screenplay, based on the novel Point de Lendemain by Dominique Vivant), Louis Malle (director) Les Amants (The Lovers) / 1958

 

When Louis Malle’s film The Lovers first premiered in the US in 1959, people were scandalized by its open sexuality; a theater manager in Cleveland Heights, Ohio was arrested and convicted for the public depiction of obscene material. Appealing to the United States Supreme Court, Nico Nacobellis won, with the court finding the film was not pornographic, but there was no agreement among the justices about what might constitute pornography or whether or not it was even illegal. Perhaps Justice Potter Stewart expressed the opinion best in his now famous statement: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

     Today, in fact, the lovemaking in question is so innocent that we can observe far more steamier scenes on daytime television, although surely, to many Americans, the story of a beautiful, wealthy woman (Jeanne Moreau)—married to newspaper editor, Henri Tournier—who has an affair with her friend’s polo-playing boyfriend, Raoul Floes (José Luis de Vilallonga) and who later spends a night with a much younger guest, Bernard Dubois-Lambert (Jean-Marc Bory) for whom she leaves her negligent husband and beloved daughter, might still raise hackles. Malle was only 26 at the time of this film’s release, about the age of his anthropology student hero.

     If the plot is thin, the actors make up for it, particularly the ever evocative Moreau, her best friend Maggy (Judith Magre), the suave de Vilallonga, and the highly romantic Bory. Moreover, whatever this love triangle suffers in tension, Malle’s and Henri Decaë’s beautiful cinematography makes up for it. Particularly the scenes in which Moreau, traveling from Paris to her home Dijon speeds through avenues of plane trees, where Malle’s camera reveals how the trees mask the light behind them, hinting at how Madame Turnier feels trapped and spends too much time in France’s capital city.

    Henri (Alain Cuny), moreover, makes a perfect villain, a man so caught up in his work that even when his stylishly dressed wife makes a sudden inexplicable visit to his workplace, where the printing presses run at full speed, it appears to care less, sending a secretary out to intercept his wife, as she dodges the woman—who for all she knows may have a closer relationship to her husband than she does—to confront him, without finding the words to say anything but that she is lonely before quickly leaving again.

    The film becomes particularly interesting, however, when late for her own dinner party for her friends in Dijon, where she meets Bernard. She is desperate to get home in time for the event when her car breaks down, and she is forced to catch a ride with a young man. The wonder of the entire sequence of events is that, as furious to move forward in time at high speeds to get her date, Dubois-Lambert drives slowly, insistent about stopping off in a small village to visit a former professor on his birthday. Obviously, he caring, solid, and steady—all in opposition to her insistence to keep up with social fray, which is also, of course, what keeps drawing her to Paris and to her friend Maggy, described by the young anthropologist friend as “empty-headed.”

     It is only in the final night scene when Jeanne and Bernard spend time together in a small boat, that we realize also that this young man is incredibly tender and loving. Perhaps the scenes on the boat and after when the two make love—as I mentioned earlier, quite chastely—which seems so scandalous to the 1959 US audiences. In these scenes the actors truly do seem to be actually in love rather than just acting, unembarrassed by their actions. Truffaut described these scenes as “the cinema’s first night of love”—an overstatement, perhaps, but close to the truth.

     Malle show the pair in various sensuous positions, obviously in the whirl of dizziness that good sex for the first time often carries with it, the director moving the camera through what appears to be a gauzy haze of romance.

      Clearly it is enough for Jeanne, who in the next scene packs her bags and takes off for a completely unknown territory with the young student, realizing that, if nothing else, it will certainly be better than the duplicitous life she has been living.

      Finally, Malle’s film is a highly moral one. As he, himself, described what he as attempting to do in this film: “I wanted to devote an entire film to the study of a woman who gives up a routine of the usual morality for a higher morality of self-realization.” If this is pornography, so is everything.

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2016).