Artificial Paradises

...In the interest of concentrating on this sinner and saint, the novel has been cut, simplified, and changed—to the extent that it would be idle even to begin to list the departures and simplifications of the screenplay...

...But when, in the fall, he does, Lucile still enjoys waiting for and looking after him...

...So he finds her a job as a file clerk with a newspaper, which seems absurd when she could so easily be fashion editor of Marie-Claire or Elle: After all, it is Catherine Deneuve who enacts—or, rather, wears the clothes of—the part...

...In fact, this could be a perfect late '30s'-early '40s' movie...

...The heroin comes at the end of a gradus ad Parnassum: First there is pot and hash, pep pills and what looks to my untrained eye like opium...

...Poverty in Mile Sagan always means modest yet tasteful surroundings, such as An-toine's cozy, book-lined garconniere overlooking the back of the Elysee Palace...

...The film was made mostly in English, which Griinberg speaks with unseemly Teutonic gutturals...

...The ambiguities of woman—or of the concept of woman as imagined and depicted by men—are not new to either Durrell's or Hollywood's Alexandria...

...She is hooked on the stuff...

...But what is ultimately amiss is not what hits our eyes and ears...

...How far can you go on a The...

...Mile Sagan has demonstrated her profound, her incomparable knowledge of the human heart's darkest recesses...

...But Charles is nevertheless somewhat upset when Lucile, having drunk herself into a sun-baked stupor at St.-Tropez out of sheer yearning for Antoine, finally announces that she is leaving his palatial mansion in Neuilly for the said tastefully modest surroundings...

...and there are moments when her mere accent is a burden on her characterization...

...Estelle doesn't even attend his paltry funeral...

...Here I spilt wine on her cloak, and while attempting to help her repair the damage, accidentally touched her breasts...

...Lucile resolutely trudges back toward luxury and Charles...

...The movie Justine, despite leaden forays into homosexuality, trans-vestitism...

...But for Antoine, callow youth that he is, this isn't enough...

...Lucile sneaks away to accept an invitation from Charles to a high-society musicale...

...once again, workmanlike but unlovely (compare his desert with Frederick Young's in Lawrence of Arabia...

...For those who want to revel in nudity, there is plenty of it...

...It is very idyllic in Antoine's nook all summer long while Antoine doesn't have to work...

...After a stormy Mainliner experience, the lovers return to town and Stefan goes to work as a bartender for the ex-Nazi...

...Now this is where money really makes a difference...

...But not, it would seem, as far as Hollywood...

...thus a scene in which Pursewarden's blind sister, Liza, has a letter from her brother read to her —this establishes the incest motif and makes clear her blindness, as her one previous scene does not—is cut from the film, though it is still listed in the official synopsis...

...But soon Estelle is back dallying with the ex-Nazi, which drives first Stefan, then her, back into the arms of horse...

...The dictionary at the British embassy is not the Shorter Oxford, but, inappropriately, Webster's Second...

...But Michael Dunn is drippingly effective as Mnemjian the barber, shorn though his part may be...

...In Justine we still get a beautiful woman when her hair is down...

...Gene Tierney in Sundown...

...the gorgeous young butterfly, and is so understanding that he virtually pushes her into the arms of impecunious young Antoine, the lover of a rich widow and employed as a publisher's reader...

...While Pursewarden spoke so brilliantly of Alexandria and the burning library...

...Es-telle is mysteriously involved with a tough ex-Nazi, a big hotelier on the island...

...This becomes evident when you consider that the complexities and contradictions of Justine are no more brought out by him than are the anfractuosities of Alexandria...

...Notice how plot is encroached on by locale, and how the latter preponderates...

...whereas the meaty Melissa scarcely conveys consumption...

...In almost no time, Lucile quits the grubby job, takes it easy, and sells her jewels to make Antoine believe that she is still gainfully employed...

...it is the scriptwriter, the director and, behind them, the studio that see to that...

...Sagan is rather like an old wound that seems to have cicatrized until her next opus appears, and we once again feel the same pain in the neck or arse...

...incest, and child prostitution, remains as naively old-fashioned in its emotional and intellectual vocabulary as in its actual verbiage and cinematic technique...

...a less beautiful one when her hair is up...

...the reverse is now equally evident...

...The old cook, to be sure, knows better...

...The work has a single protagonist whose name is not Justine or Clea or Darley but Alexandria, the loved and hated city, which alone pervades the pages of the book with its ruthless amorality and immutable variousness...

...The lovers undertake a cure from heroin by means of—yes, indeed!—lsd...

...The story concerns Charles, the super-rich middle-aged businessman, who lives with Lucile...

...The trans-vestites seem to shriek their male-ness...

...Joseph Strick, who began work on the film and was fired (or quit), is more intellectually inclined, but lacks even Cukor's slick competence...

...Yet what can we expect from a movie that omits the novel's most delightful character, Scobie...

...For those who want to explore the details of drug-taking...

...The acting tends to be uninspired and conventional—so the Nessim of John Vernon and the Pursewarden of Dirk Bogarde (that remarkable actor is here crippled by the script...

...a double when there is a nude bathing scene...

...Cliff Gorman and Elaine Church (Toto and Liza) make nothing of their small parts, and George Baker and Severn Dar-den (Mountolive and Balthazar) get wholly lost in the shuffle...

...But love conquers all?even a little white deception and a medium-hard slap—and everything might still be salvaged...

...and Jerry Goldsmith's music is a disaster...

...Miss Farmer helped translate the laconic and moronic dialogue into somewhat stale hip English, and like, man, it's not More, it's the most...

...Even the final editing is faulty...

...Such third and fourth dimensions, however, were stripped off the story and it now unfolds in linear conventionality...

...Michael York, as Darley, does not succeed in suggesting a struggling artist, and Pursewarden's novelistic activities are eliminated altogether...

...In all fairness, we must admit that English is not Miss Aimee's strong suit (not so long ago, coming out of Fiddler on the Roof, she ran into me and asked, "Qu' est-ce que ca veut dire, 'fidelere...

...Stefan manages to get her away from him and they go to live in a secluded villa on the rocks overlooking the sea...

...But writers' Alexandrias remain...

...Leon Shamroy's color photography is...

...During the nude gambols—how they gyre and gimble in the wabe!?Mimsy displays a small and flaccid enough bosom and a large and square enough bottom to make the toughest mome raths outgrabe on the spot...

...Even more unpleasant, though, is Mimsy Farmer's breathy Marilyn Monroe-Jackie Kennedy English, in which "charcoal," for instance, is pronounced "chuhkuh," the uh's representing gusts of breath...

...C'est toujours la meme odeur ici," someone says in La Chamade, which the subtitle renders as "It always smells good here," though with reference to Sagan a more literal translation would be preferable...

...The film is directed and photographed with exquisite elegance, and contains, aside from the above plot, the requisite number of decadent minor characters, expensively furnished interiors...

...She goes down to their neigborhood bistro, phones Antoine, and, repressing further tears, tells him it's all over...

...The movie's chief purpose, apparently, is to be a pendant to Mies van der Rohe's famous dictum, "Less is more...

...This is the Alexandria about which the poet Cavafy (himself a shadowy presence in the novel) warned: "You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas./ The city will follow you...

...Cukor, declared "a genuine artist" by Andrew Sarris, is, in my opinion, a paradigmatic hack...

...but an actress, never...

...and Lucile opts for an abortion...

...but can provide only an inexpensive local abortionist...

...Of course, she also makes love divinely...

...Consider this passage from the novel Justine: "Place Zagloul—silverware and caged doves...

...though Durrell's City may be as imaginary as Pierre Louys' or Anatole France's, the film must recreate it...

...As one of her recent directors told me, her head is now so swelled that she can hardly walk through an ordinary door...

...merely obfuscates the issue...

...Yet it is not so much the fact that the film was shot largely in Hollywood (and slightly in Tunisia) that syphonsAlexandria out of the screenplay...

...Charles, apprised, supplies Lucile with a stylish and safe operation in a Swiss clinic...

...Unfortunately, Es-telle brings along a tertium quid?and I don't mean her girlfriend who visits and is made love to by both Estelle and Stefan, but a large quantity of heroin she stole from her aging lover...

...In the room above a poor wretch screaming with meningitis...

...Though the Bergman film contains some Mozart music, what is that compared to a Mozart sonata performed live in a salon full of chic people...

...the child brothel looks much less sordid than Durrell (and, I suppose, truth) would have it...

...Once again...

...But what it could have easily and impressively done is to convey Durrell's neo-Proustian perspective: the changing point of view, which redefines and refines people and events as it adds to them new dimensions, further understanding, or just a more hermetic mystery...

...When he finds out the awful truth, he gives her one medium-hard slap...

...One evening, when Antoine has to confer with some of his authors, he deposits Lucile at a cinema showing Hour of the Wolf...

...Although that seems to describe Sa-gan's art more accurately than Mozart's, Lucile is so happy to be reimmersed in all this moneyed graciousness that she spends the night with Charles...

...This is a supreme example of that new kind of film in which things happen for no reason, illogically and unbelievably, while the dialogue, if it is forthcoming at all...

...a Gioconda smile when mystery is to be suggested...

...An altogether dispensable girl, this Mimsy, looking and acting like a cross between Sandy Dennis and a young Lizabeth Scott, with added suggestions of Jean Seberg and a death's-head...

...No word was spoken...

...More may prove a fairly exact manual...

...However, it is hard on an impecunious lover's pride to have his baby aborted in style at a pecunious ex-lover's expense...

...Alas, Lucile becomes pregnant...

...Even the many-faced Justine is not so different from other Hollywood North-Africana—say...

...Saddest of all is the pitiful showing of the great Marcel Dalio in an almost subliminal part...

...or obvious and embarrassing—thus Robert Forster's Narouz and Jack Albertson's Cohen...

...and even reads some of the books he brings back from the publisher's...

...Details are carelessly mismanaged or glossed over...

...The film is photographed in rather amateurish color by Nestor Almendros, but Ibiza is a wildly photogenic place, and at times these Balearic balnearies look better than the primitive film-making deserves...

...Nowadays, that bespeaks a certain backwardness, so perhaps she couldn't have made fashion editor at Elle...

...and the irrepressible Philippe Noiret is splendid as Pombal...

...A Gallic pill of a slightly older sort is Alain Cavalier's La Cha-made, the film he and Francoise Sagan adapted from the latter's novel of the same name...

...As Stefan, Klaus Griinberg looks all right naked, but cannot act very much...

...Quite rightly...

...The scene in which he confesses his incest to Melissa, who lies in bed next to him, unsatisfied, is so dramatically unprepared for, sketchy, and dully staged and photographed that it affects us, if at all, comically...

...As Estelle, Mimsy Farmer neither looks good nor acts well...

...Antoine wants the baby and marriage, but one look at the outside of the ultramodern apartment house they then would have to live in—no old-world charm whatever...

...Durrell's tetralogy is not a work of genius, but it is imbued with the genius loci...

...Justine is both faithful and whorish, both Helen and Penelope, and the cause of the film we are discussing...

...It shows in her work: Where is the actress who enchanted us first in The Golden Salamander and The Lovers of Verona, later in La dolce vita and 8 V2, and last in A Man and a Woman...

...Some 16 centuries ago, the poet-grammarian Palladas of Alexandria wrote of woman: "Be she chaste or a whore, either way she is perdition...

...she predicts Mademoiselle will come back...

...This Cavafian Alexandria is as vanished as the Pharos and the Library, if indeed it ever existed...

...This is the sort of thing that our film dare not, will not, cannot do...

...As day breaks over Paris...

...This is the story (allegedly based on fact) of a German student who heads south for the sun...

...What George Cukor, the director, and Lawrence B. Marcus, the scenarist, have left us with is the slick portrait of a fascinating woman of Alexandria, Justine Hosnani...

...Stefan tries to save her from the Big H, but is himself soon enslaved by it...

...Anna Ka-rina is passable as Melissa...

...Purse-warden, for example, is described as the wittiest man in Alexandria, yet the film shies away from letting him deploy his erudite and dissecting wit...

...It is true that the marvelous Anouk Aimee has progressively ceased being an actress in order to turn more and more into a star...

...Indeed, the interminable nude swimming, sunbathing and love-making sequences suffer considerably from the pair's lack of charm...

...it is what does not strike our hearts...

...At last, apparently on purpose, Stefan takes a double dose of shit and dies—just in time, for I have run out of synonyms for the stuff...

...If only George Cukor were more than a commercial director...

...Irene Shar-aff's costumes lack brio...

...The relationship is hurt to the quick...

...During the recital, Lucile sips champagne while Charles, with exquisite connoisseurship, whispers in her ear something about "the same little phrase—those four notes that obsessed Mozart all his life...

...Magnanimously, Antoine consents...

...Barbet Schroeder, the 27-year-old producer of several newest-wave movies, has come up with his own firstling called More...

...A message scribbled on the edge of a newspaper...

...For all this, the film is watchable, especially if one has not read the book or forgotten it, which is easy to do...

...A vaulted cave lined with black barrels and choking with the smoke from flying whitebait and the smell of retzin-nato...

...Of course, it is devilishly hard to get the atmosphere of a place on film when that place is to take precedence over its people...

...he wants her to do useful work...

...Toward dawn, she makes one more trip to her love-den, touches the sleeping Antoine ever so lightly, follows his pinned-up instructions to turn down the stove, and, fighting back her tears, sets the breakfast table for him...

...From wicked Alexandria to wicked Ibiza...

...starves and gets involved in crime in Paris, picks up at a wild party a mocdy, abstracted American girl about whom he is warned, falls into bed with her, and finally follows her to Ibiza...

...But that City, whose situation E. M. Forster called "most curious," is curiously and grievously absent from the film...

...The masters of this mode are Godard and Chabrol, and it is not for nothing that Schroeder here collaborated with the latter's scriptwriter, Paul Ge-gauff...

...All the woes of the Iliad were for the sake of one woman, and Penelope was the cause of the Odyssey...

...Yves St.-Laurent clothes, and high-priced cars...

...all that is missing is Norma Shearer or Barbara Stanwyck swishing about...