I have been looking for this movie for almost 25 years, ever since seeing it during a university course on 17th century French literature. Despite not being one of my favorite plays, the movie made quite an impression on me, and had several memorable scenes. It was filmed in a "natural" style, out of doors and not in a theater, which perhaps didn't work quite as well as it was intended to; the rather fantastic aspects of the "haunting" at the end might have been more dramatic in a more stylized setting. But the actor playing Dom Juan carried the production very well, and is my chief memory of the film. He had a sort of controlled fury that I was probably too young at the time to understand very well, but which definitely left a mark. The way he tosses alms to a beggar he's failed to tempt into blasphemy; 'Pour l'amour de l'humanité' there was a bitterness in the words that still leaves me pondering them, many years later. And just before the climax, when he strides furiously across the grass to the building (maybe a conservatory?) where he will meet nemesis, the director adds the touch of having Dom Juan throw down his sword as he goes, voluntarily disarming himself before his fateful dinner with the statue of the dead Commander. This is a movie I'd be eager to see again, despite not being terribly easy to understand.
Review of Dom Juan ou Le festin de pierre
