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The hedonistic coed (Haydée Politoff) enters by the beachfront, the camera abstracts her in cubist analysis (shoulder blades, back of knees, neck). Her sullen silence is contrasted with the other sides of the triangle, the antiques dealer (Patrick Bauchau) and the shaggy artist (Daniel Pommereulle), both given to prolix self-questioning. Face to face with the Mediterranean, the vacationing intellect and the exhaustive labors of taking it easy, the labyrinth is the shared villa in St. Tropez. The gamine's provocative indolence puts a dent in the dealer's armor of distanced irony, he proceeds in a succession of advances and retreats, flirtations and hostilities. "Very concerned with their appearance and the affect they had on people," the Eric Rohmer specimens under a lush microscope. An objet d'art gag in the introduction summarizes the approach, a paint can studded with blades and intently contemplated by a poseur ("Thought surrounded (ouch!) by razors. I'm bleeding"). The collector of pleasure, "l'exécrable ingénue," she prefers to be seen as a searcher and has little use for the "phony noncomformists" alternately judging and craving her. Behind this shifting relationship, Rohmer and Néstor Almendros conduct an intense study of space and Nature, countless gradations of sunlight and seawater and a virtuoso sound design of birds, crickets, off-screen airplanes and, above all, the teasing wavelength of desire and uncertainty. Rousseau and Dalí, a certain air of Bonjour Tristesse. Chekhov's Chinese vase figures in the heroine's entanglement with the smug American client (Eugene Archer), a little compression of Le Mépris to expose the protagonist's "Machiavellian side." (The scene's concision—shatter, slap, smile before mirror—is typical of the style.) "One must know when to be moral." A pellucid comedy of procrastination, Chabrol is very near with Les Biches. With Alain Jouffroy, Mijanou Bardot, Annik Morice, and Dennis Berry.
--- Fernando F. Croce |