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The goatish gaze, the author's theorem: "To be written, it must happen." The shapely structure is a transposition of Laclos with Nabokov echoes filtering through, Eric Rohmer sculpts it sagaciously against the greens and blues of summertime Annecy. Wolves and foxes "in transit" at the lake house, the cultural attaché a few weeks shy of matrimony (Jean-Claude Brialy) and the droll novelist who prefers discovering to inventing (Aurora Cornu), one is a pawn in the other's scénario. She has an unfinished narrative in need of a guinea pig ("a good story with banal characters"), he enjoys himself as the potential seducer of their host's daughter (Béatrice Romand) until one day he gazes at the dimpled knee of the tawny gazelle (Laurence de Monaghan) and the knee practically winks back at him. Now "the magnet of my desire," the appendage must be fondled, a tantalizing caprice becomes a diplomat's mission. "The turmoil she arouses in me gives me a sort of right over her." A system of flirtations, glances, smiles and fibs engineered by Rohmer with a splendid Lubitsch deadpan, his camera warm as sunlight and sharp like a scalpel. The would-be roué speaks of fate and likens his situation to a leap off a mountain, yet his verbiage is easily skewered by the frank ardor of Romand's frizzy nymphet. (A sight gag involving a glass of juice held out above the aloof beauty's lap is not just another deflation of masculine control but, in its modest way, an illustration of why this is cinema and not literature.) The decisive caress under a sudden drizzle, mixing consummation, violation and consolation as waters grow muddy (cf. Renoir's Picnic on the Grass). Don Quixote is still blindfolded at the close so the shimmering final view belongs to the women, any sense of smug contest is washed away by a shrug and an embrace. Cinematography by Néstor Almendros. With Michèle Montel, Gérard Falconetti, and Fabrice Luchini.
--- Fernando F. Croce |