The Lovers
June 1, 2008
Louis Malle’s second feature, following the success of the jazzy noir “Elevator to the Gallows”, is a film stuck in time, somewhere between the classical elegance of France’s cinema of tradition, and the groundbreaking freedom of the upcoming New Wave, which is why it’s usually defined only by one unusually erotic sex scene, instead of the lush quality of Malle and Henri Decae’s gorgeous visuals. An on-the-rise Jeanne Moreau stars as a country housewife who, bored with her busy husband and dreamy but needy lover, falls hard one magical night for a casual acquaintance (Jean-Marc Bory), suggesting loose morals and high susceptibility amongst a wealthy crowd disinterested in feelings and commitment. Of the famous sex scene, in which the camera hangs a bit too long on the pleasured face and tense hands of Moreau, Malle says in an archived interview, presented on Criterion’s new DVD, that to break from convention he needed to show real human interaction, rather than the standard fade-out, placing the scene, and the film, squarely between two eras, one of traditional repression, and independent freedom.
by Adam Suraf