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Amants, Les (1958)

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15 comments in total

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17 out of 17 people found the following comment useful :-
The Lovers, 28 November 2005

Author: zolaaar from Berlin, GER

What you see here is Jeanne Moreau's famous first filmic female orgasm and director Louis Malle's second feature film. Les amants / The Lovers was at that time a controversial study of bourgeois emptiness and sexual yearnings. The (as widely described) inscrutable Moreau plays a high society wife who is bored by her rich husband, has a lover, smart friends and a daughter. On one night she makes passionate love with a young student of a few hours acquaintance, and leaves it all for a new life.

If it now looks too much like an angry young sensualist's movie, the combination of a body language that is highly pleasurable, the soundtrack of Brahms, and the Henri Decaë's velvety monochrome, ravishing photography proves hard to resist. Her second collaboration with director Malle shows once more, what a wonderful screen persona Moreau is: commanding, willful, sultry.

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8 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
Looking for real happiness, 6 May 2007

Author: esteban hernandez from Italy

In 1959 this film was considered as something close to porno, but this is far enough from the reality. Jeanne Moreau was young, nice and attractive. She was the star of this film, which goes slowly as usual in French cinema's style. When you see this type of film you must become a psychologist to penetrate inside the brains of each hero and make some conclusions. Accordingly I concluded that life is not a straight line, suddenly something may happen in our lives that deviate completely this straight line. Formal ethics accepted by the society goes sometimes to extremes that does not enable the persons to behave and feel happy. What's wrong when the current life is disrupted to start a new one? At this point I advise you to see this old, and black and white film, which may compel you to think and to conclude something new, probably different to what I am saying here.

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9 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
Early Louis Malle Classic, 28 January 1999
Author: John Mankin (mankin@rff.org)

Luminously inscrutable Jeanne Moreau gives one of her best performances in Louis Malle's "The Lovers" (1958:***1/2), a chic and entertaining romantic drama that was quite controversial in its day because of a prolonged love scene in the last half hour. Of course, today it seems very innocent, indeed. She plays the bored wife of a wealthy newspaper owner who impulsively decides to runs off with a young man who picks her up after her car stalls on the highway. Since the lover is played by a handsome young actor named Jean-Marc Bory (wonder whatever happened to him), who could blame her? Malle offers delicate hints during the morning after that the affair may not last too long. All-in-all, an exquisite film. The video version is letterboxed, too, which is a big plus.

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9 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
Slow paced and not an easy watch but engaging and interesting regardless of whether you empathise or judge, 20 June 2005
Author: bob the moo from Birmingham, UK

Jeanne Tournier is a bored middle-aged woman. She lives in comfort with her wealthy husband, children and small army of maids and servants but yet she is not happy. Her husband is distant and spiteful while her relationship with a polo-playing lover has become stale and tiresome. Returning from one of her many "trips to Paris", Jeanne's car breaks down and she is helped by a young student who takes her back to her home where he is invited to join the Tournier's and their guests for dinner. He stays the night and quickly starts to peal away the layers of frustration and offer her something else if she is brave enough to take it.

Although it probably says more about America than the shock value of this film, the fact that this was legally classed as "not pornography" brought it a success that continues to this day and was the main reason I decided to join those who had seen it by seeing it. From a content point of view I must admit that I found it hard to get into Jeanne as a character because the film did sort of expect us to accept her adultery and sex as part of her escaping and growing in some way – a thing that will not always be true, sometime people just cheat and there is no reason for it other than the most basic. However, unless this really bothers you, there is still much to enjoy in the character if not totally in the story. The plot is basic but the writing and delivery allows for enough to engage although, as I said, it may annoy as much as please, it depends on your point of view.

Like her character or not, Moreau is certainly powerful and assured in her performance and she seems to really understand the complexities of her character – never judging or excusing anything to a point where it would be overdone. Her body language is as convincing as her dialogue and she is really a good reason for watching the film – hell, she almost makes you believe her character's reasoning and have sympathy for her (almost). The support cast are all good with similarly natural performances from Bory, Magre, de Villalonga and others; however the film belongs to Moreau in terms of performances. The other main reason for watching is the crisp and stylish direction from Malle and the wonderful black and white photography. Although it has long lost its shock value today, the love scene is pretty strong stuff considering the period.

Overall this will not appeal to the masses because it is pretty slow and is all about complex inner issues that do not lend themselves to clear plotting, easy answers or pace. This is not to say that it can cope with these problems well, because it doesn't totally manage it and it does come off a little "up itself" in how it presents some of the issues but the direction, cinematography and acting all make it worth seeing, meanwhile the material will engage whether you are annoyed by it or sympathise with it.

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5 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Censored for all the wrong reasons, 4 February 2003

Author: anagram14 from Zürich, Switzerland

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Wait a minute. Did Les Amants really get into the trouble it did because of the love scene in the last half-hour? The scene in itself is nothing. However, here we have a married woman in the 1950s, committing adultery not once but twice, and without remorse. If Vivant and Malle had told their tale the accepted way, the situation would have led to bloody murder, and given the grim coldness between Jeanne and her husband, that's exactly what the audience expects. But - SPOILER: the authors opted for a happy ending. So of course they were seen as condoning adultery. Violence, it seems, would have been no big deal by comparison...

Happy ending? Well, not quite. Les Amants is odd in another respect: while it is all about the transforming potential of falling in love, it idealizes the process far less than most so-called romantic comedies do. As the blissful couple purr out of the picture in Bernard's 2CV, we hear a sage voice-over comment on the uncertainty of their future. This echoes the background of the opening credits, a fictitious map of the land of love, depicting (as far as my memory serves me) a river named Affection, passing through many little hills such as Respect, Dedication etc., far from the Lake of Indifference, and flowing to a Dangerous Sea and to Terra Incognita. In this sense, there's more to the story than "beautiful socialite meets handsome young guy". This is no fairy-tale. It's about stuff like living in the moment, openness, and courage - and about the archetypal meeting of animus and anima. Or should I say projection? Fuhgeddabahdit! Apart from all the crap I'm giving you here, Malle plus Moreau equals gorgeous movies. Go see for yourself.

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6 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
A love thornbird still searching her destination, 8 April 2004
Author: shu-fen from Hong Kong, China

Crazy about French movies ever since I started watching them. The black and white is more appropriate than colour for French film, very captivating and unreal.

What can you say about the French people? Desperados and aficionados of romance and love. Hopelessly romantics.

Simple story told like a poem regardless of any moral criticism, there is no such thing call moral or immoral in the realm of art. Art is a rival to moral, it allows all sorts of existences. In this movie, the sin is adultery but no one cares to condemn it, the pursuit of love takes it all. The love scene might be stunning to the audience in late 50s France, but definitely not today. Jeanne Moreau somehow took a bold step. Anyway, she is radiating gloriously in superb cinematography.

Jeanne Tournier married to a well-off provincial newspaper owner for eight years. She has a daughter, a polo-playing lover and a big bunch of acid-tongued snobbish Parisian friends. Nevertheless, she is bored about living in such a polite society. Finally when Bernard, a young student whom she has known just for a few hours, enters into her life, just after solely one night's time in her husband's villa with him, she decides to leave with him into the uncertain future the very next morning.

Several lyrical scenes impress me a great deal. Their nightly accidental encounter at the garden. Jeanne is illuminating the dimness, she looks like a mystic fairy seducing Bernard. Another one is the astonishing look of her friend when she sees them leaving together. The most memorable is the very last scene, they drive and drive into uncertain.

The map shown at the beginning and the voice-over at the end may be something like a warning. However, when two lovers in love that they can sacrifice everything for the romance in such a desperate fashion, nothing is threatening. Feminists or women who are fighting for their freedom would be clapping their hands… she's got guts.

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
The most romantic film ever made, 1 October 2006

Author: danielhsf (danielhsf@hotmail.com) from Singapore

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

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.

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10 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :-
Insipid mess, go get some Bergman, 11 June 2005

Author: matthewscott8 from United Kingdom

This is my first Louis Malle film and I found myself really quite disappointed. One of the other posters says that the theme is about freedom and uncertainty. I would agree with this, but to be blunt a better way to learn about the subject would be to listen to the Brahms' String Sextets without the film.

Jeanne Moreau has been described in this movie as inscrutable, I'd agree with that, in this film we find out absolutely nothing of interest about her character, and I'm left perplexed as to the attraction Bernard had for her (purely libidinous?). The morality of the film is very confusing, certainly we can applaud Jeanne's existential urge to escape from her stifling fling, her marriage, and her Parisienne lifestyle, but the fact that she leaves her daughter behind is execrable. The woodland scenes are intriguing but a bit too contrived. If you want to see films about relationships I would suggest most of the oeuvre of Ingmar Bergman, which is far superior.

All in all a rather insipid, though beautiful, mess. Deserves 7 out of 10 because it is provocative and like all good art, subversive.

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If love is where the heart is, does it make you hot?, 12 May 2008

Author: Chris Docker (eyeforfilm) from Scotland, United Kingdom

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

A married woman (some years after concluding a successful affair, I might add) once lectured me that love was about commitment and being able to get on with one another. Perhaps, I thought. Except poetry – and perhaps French literature especially, gives the word a somewhat more vibrant texture. A meaning many of us will still maybe yearn for – and powerfully - in our heart of hearts.

'Jeanne' in this film is played by Jeanne Moreau. Beautiful and sexy. She is trapped in a marriage of monotony. Husband is a successful newspaper publisher. Their Dijon country château is one of understated wealth. Industriously posh establishment, if you like.

Jeanne visits her friend Maggy in Paris regularly. Maggie is trendy and superficial. She approves of Jeanne's affair with Raoul, a rather buff polo star. Unlike Jeanne's husband Henri (who, it must be said, is a boring old fart), Raoul is attentive and adoring. Society chic, if you like.

Into the mix suddenly appears Bernard, an archaeologist. He hates Maggy's in-crowd – describing them as 'flavour of the day.' He is probably everything Henri would be if Henri had a life. (Henri has years of slaving in a publishing house. Plenty of money. Plenty of nice furniture. Including a wife.) \He politely welcomes Bernard, who has rescued Jeanne when her car breaks down.

If this were a rom-com you'd guess the rest. Queue steamy sex with artistic lighting. And while Les Amants gives you plenty of what you expect, it also gives you plenty of what you don't. Unresolved moral quandaries – if you like, or not.

It was the moral outrage – a married woman leaving her husband and children after a night of sex – that probably led to obscenity charges on its release in America in the late fifties. Far more than the momentary nudity. The latter seems mild today. Yet the film is as fresh as it was then. As challenging as it was then. And as beautiful.

Les Amants is shot in immaculate black and white. The men playing polo. The exquisitely photographed French countryside. And a Brahms (Sextet in B-flat Major) leitmotif which both immortalises the passion and encourages us to attach importance to its emotional and aesthetic qualities. Jeanne's first world (with Henri) is dead and empty. Her second (with Raoul) is a pleasant distraction but shallow. Visually and verbally, Bernard connects to Jeanne in an altogether different way. He makes her work for it but then rewards her. Henri makes her work for attention but doesn't give it. Raoul showers it on her with no effort on her part.

Bernard ignores Jeanne's 'damsel in distress' pitch when her car breaks down. "Engines and I don't see eye to eye," he tells her. Until Jeanne breaks out of her pathetic helpless-female stereotype he is uninterested. He makes her to laugh, comparing her husband to a bear. We see Jeanne making a determined effort with her appearance. Bernard's poetry wears her down. He fills her head with visions of how beautiful the night is – and then associates her vision with how he sees her. He awakes the divine in Jeanne – "Her angel's smile gleamed." The moonlight tryst sees light rippling through leaves onto water. Bernard frees the fish caught by Jeanne's husband's traps. He is freeing her spirit from her dark depths. His intrusion (like the bat and flies at the house) is first seen as a threat. But it is her freedom he acknowledges, that she has denied herself, that is too horrible to countenance. "Is this a land you invented for me to lose myself in?" she asks.

Jeanne realises that the part of her she dreads the most is the only thing that makes her feel alive. "Her world is falling apart. A hateful husband and an almost ridiculous lover. The tragedy Jeanne thought she was in had become a farce. Suddenly she wishes she could become someone else." Readers may recall the not too dissimilar dilemma of Julianne Moore's character in The Hours. She leaves a husband and child and disappears to become someone else. In that story, no lover complicates the dilemma. She is simply suffocating. We are tempted to condemn Jeanne's action because of her night of passion. But she is similarly escaping from an impossible life. A duty to her husband, yes. To her offspring, of course. But isn't the highest duty to her own being, her own life? And it is not as if Bernard is a philanderer. He wants her for always. But instead of reassuring us that everything will turn out well, director Louis Malle realistically allows our protagonists to acknowledge that they face an unknown. They are well-suited – there is none of the narrative primitivism of, say, Women in Love. But Les Amants is a film of emotional and moral honesty. No wonder it shocked the bourgeoisie. And American values.

The obscenity charges in the USA went to the high court. Justice Potter Stewart overturned them and made his famous pronouncement on pornography: "I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." European films of this ilk helped to push the bland American film-making of the time towards greater artistic freedom. Les Amants established Jeanne Moreau's on screen image as a sexually independent woman. Her strong performance as someone responding to three very different life choices cemented her onward career.

This is a film of courage, of a sophisticated beauty singing in tune with her own nature, rejecting the limiting values of industry and society. It is the story of a woman finding she is the equal of man – and finding a man that is her equal. The last portion is perhaps overly sentimental. But it is sentimental about the dark night of her soul. Not a disneyfied happy ending. If you are shocked after seeing the film, ask yourself why.

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1 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Lovers And Other Strangers, 23 April 2007

Author: writers_reign from London, England

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

This represents yet another nail in the coffin of the new wavelet; released in 1958 it features everything the spoiled brats were rebelling against and as if that weren't enough it was shot by Henri Decae, who they liked to claim as their own, proving here that at heart he was light years away from their hand-held arrogance. Nice, too, to see Alain Cuny who seemed to disappear - at least from International screens - after Les Visiteurs du soir as the boring (to his wife) semi aristocrat owner of both a newspaper and a château, neither of which does much to scratch the itch afflicting his wife, Jeanne Moreau, which even the attentions of a polo-playing lover cannot assuage. There's some nice observations of the Old-Money set in their natural habitat, ravishing black and white photography and a set piece in a nocturnal wood that is the very antithesis of new wavelet novelty. It was the second time hand-running that Moreau had played an adulterous wife for Malle and if anything she was better this time around. Now it's available in a boxed set of Malle it may attract the attention it deserves.

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