On Screen
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen UNFORTUNATE FRENCH COINCIDENCES BY ROBERT ASAHINA Adultery and adolescence- where would French films be without them? Probably in much better shape, judging from the overfamiliarity and...
...Everyone finds out about their trysting when Bernard is once more driven to violence...
...While Marlaud is not much better in that role, at least he has perfected the self-conscious slouch and mumble of an ungainly adolescent, perhaps because he is one in real life...
...A more serious flaw is the fact that Blier's phony daring prevents any real grappling with his subject...
...The Woman Next Door is nevertheless not uninteresting, if only for the perverse fascination of watching Truf faut spin his wheels in the mire of melodrama (as he did in The Bride WoreBlack, Mississippi Mermaid and The Soft Skin...
...Later, at a party before Mathilde and Philippe's second honeymoon, Truffaut zooms in on Mathilde as her dress tears on a lawn chair, awkwardly providing an excuse for her to go inside and change and setting up the confrontation with Bernard that leads to their second breakup...
...I was very gentle with her.'" Nobody says Blier has to make a remorse-ridden psychological drama about sex between adults and minors...
...She'd think her daughter was very lucky...
...Not surprisingly, they resume their affair about where it left off...
...When Mathilde and Bernard are alone together for the first time in a decade, for instance, they kiss, and- honest-she faints in a heap as the violins swell...
...but soon his passion is reawakened and he begins pursuing her, despite her apparent reluctance to get involved with him again...
...Neither Ardant's nor Depardieu's performance helps matters...
...When Martine is killed in an auto accident, Marion stays with Remi rather than with her father, Charly (Maurice Ronet...
...Nothing we have learned about Mathilde accounts for her murder/ suicide...
...These hackneyed gimmicks would have been pardonable had Truffaut employed them with irony or wit...
...All he succeeds at is making his characters look silly and worse...
...Marion manages to postpone her departure until she can surrender her lover to Charlotte (Nathalie Baye), a woman she has carefully selected for him-in part, Blier, suggests , because she has a young daughter to take Marion's place in Remi's heart...
...All the more disappointing, therefore, is his The A viator's Wife, a throwback to the kind of French film that should have gone out of fashion 20 years ago...
...The girl is at first puzzled and then intrigued by his amateurish shadowing...
...In fact, some of his staging would have embarrassed Joan Crawford...
...Taken together, Beau Pere, The Aviator's Wife and The Woman Next Door do tell us one thing about the state of French films: The New Wave, no longer new or a wave, is badly in need of some new material-or new directors...
...Truffaut's attempt to portray the lovers as victims of their passion rings false in the context of an otherwise mundane tale of adultery in the provinces...
...The story, filmed more or less realistically, is little more than the lurid fantasy of an aging enfant terrible...
...Upon her release, she arranges one last liaison with Bernard, where she kills him and herself right in the middle of their making love...
...Assuming the worst, Francois confronts Anne in a bitter argument, and she tells him to mind his own business...
...She also calls out her lover's name in her sleep with her husband conveniently awake to hear...
...Not even that little can be said of the newest offering by Eric Rohmer, who usually aims higher and succeeds more often than his better-known colleague...
...No coincidence is too farfetched in this genre, no gesture too obvious...
...Referring to Mathilde's breakdown, another character tells Bernard:" You' re over it...
...It is not enough that Mathilde has kept her old photographs of Bernard...
...But what he gives us are weird, morally vacuous zombies, manipulated by a weirder auteur...
...Mathilde, who cannot bear losing him a second time, suffers a nervous collapse and is hospitalized...
...Thanks to Marion, he will have the chance to play daddy anew...
...The Aviator's Wife thus resembles a home movie, or one of those pseudo-cinema verite works of the early '60s...
...For all of that, Beau Pere isn't particularly shocking (even militant feminists have not protested the film), partly because of the cloying attempts to woo the audience with Marion's cute banter and Remi's coy asides to the camera...
...The seduction is milked dry for laughs, and Blier jazzes up the action (or lack thereof) with fancy circular pans, pointless closeups and idiosyncratic framings that are simply distracting...
...A brief summary can barely hint at how ludicrous Beau Pere is...
...The gruesome conclusion-irritatingly foreshadowed in the opening scene-is grotesquely heavy-handed as well...
...As in The Woman Next Door, The A viator's Wife relies very heavily on labored coincidences...
...Back with Anne, Francois learns that nothing happened between her and Christian...
...and get mud all over his celebrated face...
...Philippemust find them "by accident ." And, of course, she must cut and burn them up in her anger over being deprived of Bernard...
...Perhaps Truffaut is winking at us in these and other cumbersome sequences...
...Their spouses are not aware that Bernard and Mathilde had a disastrous affair 10 years earlier: To him, she was "the dame who drove me nuts...
...Marion's dialogue, for example, is so self-consciously arch that it ceases to resemble anything that any 14-year-old girl could ever say...
...Remi responds with lust, and the director encourages us to share the stepfather's feelings by indulging in arty closeups of the couple locked in an amorous pas de deux...
...Indeed, Rohmer emphasizes the aural, not the visual...
...to her, he was a "violent manic depressive...
...Probably in much better shape, judging from the overfamiliarity and flabby handling of these perennials in the latest works of Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Bertrand Blier...
...As he follows the pair he manages??by the usual happy accident-to pick up an attractive teen-ager, Lucie (Anne-Laure Meury...
...At first, he rebuffs her tentative, neighborly overtures...
...Blier tries to give his audience guilty thrills while illegitimately sidestepping the issue of genuine culpability...
...Their affair ends not long after when, Charly reappears to claim his daughter...
...Watching this meandering is a bit like listening to a boring shaggy dog story...
...If so, though, it's hard to understand his grim sentimentality elsewhere...
...Eventually they give up the chase...
...Marion (Ariel Besse) is the 14-year-old daughter of Martine (Nicole Garcia) and stepdaughter of Remi (Patrick Dewaere), a 29-year-old cocktail pianist...
...his empty bluster and arm-waving at the beginning is simply replaced by hollow sincerity afterward...
...Bernard, meanwhile, quickly settled into comfortable domesticity, now jeopardized by Mathilde's reappearance...
...Rohmer taxes our credulity when Francois notices Christian with another woman and spontaneously decides to tail them...
...Secondary characters also wander in and out to no apparent purpose, playing bass fiddles and doing other odd things...
...A Another of these mythical females crops up in Beau Pere, adapted and directed by Bertrand Blier from his own novel...
...Unfortunately, his directing is as trite as his writing...
...One morning, Francois (Philippe Marlaud), a law student working nights at the post office, accidentally spots his girlfriend, Anne (Marie Riviere), leaving her apartment with her former lover, Christian (Ma-thieu Carriere...
...Lucie turns out to be one of those all-knowing, innocently sexy teen-age girls who abound in French films...
...Blier doesn't stop there...
...As in Truffaut's film, the acting here is poor-although, in fairness, one has to point out that much better performers would find Rohmer's paltry script a challenge...
...she and Francois talk and talk about nothing in particular while spying on the unsuspecting couple...
...The inevitable complications arise as the budding female and the anxious male share close quarters...
...Moral and psychological lapses aside, Beau Pere is, finally, tediously contrived...
...What would Martine think?'" Remi asks himself...
...Humbled, he returns to his senses and to his wife...
...His use of a hand-held camera for lengthy tracking shots has no purpose, so far as I can see, except to blend with the seemingly improvised nonstop schmoozing...
...Riviere, like Ardant, is so wooden and sexless that Francois' pos-sessiveness is difficult to fathom...
...Guilt is disposed of rather partly...
...Rohmer's Chloe in the Afternoon and The Marquise of O ranked among the dozen or so most distinguished works of the past decade...
...Truffaut's The Woman Next Door, a domestic melodrama, could have been concocted in 1941 as easily as today...
...he strips off the adolescent's clothes...
...One day, Bernard and Arlette Coudray (Gerard Depardieu and Mi-chele Baumgartner) wake up in their Grenoble home to discover they have some new neighbors, Mathilde and Philippe Bauchard (Fanny Ardant and Henri Garcin...
...As in his earlier Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (featuring an older woman seducing a teen-age boy), Blier tries very hard to make the indecent natural, and consequently more disturbing...
...He resists Marion's repeated attempts to seduce him-more neurotically than nobly, and only for a while...
...In addition, there are arbitrary setups, such as a scene done in the rain for no good reason, except that it permits Remi to give an umbrella back to Charlotte...
...The hospital psychiatrist solemnly agrees: "She prefers to be sick...
...The charming Meury certainly grabs the camera with her pouty good looks, but her role is inane...
...That the whimsical title has nothing to do with what happens in the film only underscores the meaning-lessness of Rohmer's goings-on...
...She is initially so cool that her subsequent af fectlessness hardly seems a change...
...After their breakup, Mathilde (unknown to Bernard) attempted suicide, then married on the rebound and just as hastily divorced before finding Philippe...
...Blier's notion of how an adolescent virgin would go about seducing her stepfather is to have her climb into bed with him and cozy up, uttering lines too fatuous to be swallowed...
...Lucie goes her way, he goes his...
...Truffaut's screenplay, written with Suzanne Schiffman and Jean Aurel, draws on every cliche from 40 years of what are disparagingly called "women's films...
...The reality revealed by anecdotal evidence and survey data is that sex with stepdaughters is all too widespread and far less frivolous than the filmmaker would allow...
...Only the man who made The Story of Adele H. could offer such a mawkish view of madness...
...she's not...
Vol. 64 • November 1981 • No. 21
