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Nov 26, 2018Nursebob rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
Louis Malle’s lightweight dissection of upper class ennui is mainly notable for the wave of scandal its racy love scenes caused around the world—a showing in Ohio actually led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling on obscenity. Filmed with a somnolence as befits its privileged protagonists—an offscreen narrator providing Greek chorus—there is a touch of Buñuel running through Malle’s work as we see Jeanne’s rural reality play off against her bourgeois aspirations. She changes her hairstyle on a daily basis in order to remain au courant even in the country; her friend Maggy balks at having to leave Paris for an engagement in the sticks; and an attempt on Jeanne’s part to impress her friend with a hoity-toity dinner party is thrown into disarray by a nocturnal visitor. But unlike Buñuel, Malle is not entirely unsympathetic to his heroine or her dilemma, for Jeanne’s comfortably monied home life is still a stifling prison of ritual and conformity while her attraction towards an almost total stranger goes much deeper than mere physicality. It’s the physicality however which catapulted the film into arthouse infamy with a moonlight seduction leading to erotic couplings more shocking for their undercurrent of assertive female sexuality than any fleeting glimpse of Moreau’s nipple.