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Reviews
Les amants (1958)
Desperate Housewife?????
As a twenty-something, I saw this film with my boyfriend of the time, and as soon as it was over, we rushed home to do it ourselves. In the early-to-mid sixties, "Les Amants" was eroticism that was certainly explicit--albeit tastefully explicit, to our naive eyes. Made when Malle was twenty-five, with the young Jeanne Moreau, to the romantic Sextette that Brahams wrote when he was 27, this was the perfect sexy romance for its time and place.
I just saw it again, now watching as a sixty-something in an age in which "Les Amants" would probably get an R rating--and a tame one. I'm jaded too. It's hard to feel much sympathy for a desperate housewife of the upper middle class as she battles ennui. But the love sequence is still a knockout. You can't stop to think about it as the lovers, who as yet barely know each other except for their terrific physical attraction, go from garden-to-boat- to bedroom; it's still erotic in its implication. the garden is too lovely to be true, the boat is white and clean, and Moreau wears her pearl necklace throughout, but the message of a woman who has only known pedestrian sex being introduced for the first time to the Real Thing rang a bell with me (I had a similar experience, minus the garden, the pearls and the boat). I sat there bawling my head off-- with nostalgia this time for an unrecoverable experience-- through the whole sequence.
But the ending also rings true. What do you do when you come up for air?
From one of the interviews on the CD, I learned that the plot was based on an 18th century story, and I can readily see that, just as could see the fin-de-siècle Viennese origin of Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut." In neither case does the contemporary updating of the tales make them any less effective.
The Gaucho (1927)
Vintage Fairbanks, Feisty Velez, Somewhere in Argentina??
This is typical 20's Fairbanks, when he was making his grand epic swashbucklers, with typical over-complicated plots. The character reminds me of the first Zorro, but this guy is harder, and nastier (even after his miraculous reform). Fairbanks was also in his mid-forties when he made it, which explains his fined-down, but still very buff, appearance.
The plot is a mythical Argentina (with a tango thrown in to define the place, but it could take place anywhere, including Zorro's Early California. Fairbanks does wear an exotic costume, though.
Lupe Velez' Mountain Girl is the real departure. She is feisty, for one, and swashes every bit of buckle that Fairbanks does. These sort of characters are usually the one who DOESN'T get her man; here, it is with great satisfaction that she does--a woman ahead of her times!