"The Lovers" (1958)

As a departure from the genre specificity & protocol of Elevator to the Gallows, Louis Malle set out to fashion a film of 'sincerity' and 'personal value', as he had himself stated; the subsequent film would serve moreover to considerably enhance Jeanne Moreau's aura beyond the limitations of the 1st film, which had restricted her screen moments to jazzy, noirish, Miles Davis-soundtracked interludes interspersed at several junctures as a way to suspend the points of suspense in the principal narrative. Jeanne Moreau's walks through the actual night streets of Paris were a way of accomodating her bristling eros as a parallel playing against the hero's counter dilemma of getting the hell out of the elevator situation. Jeanne had few lines, and Malle felt she needed more lines, more space, more walking around - more Jeanne at any rate.

The Lovers works as a love letter to Jeanne Moreau: a woman whose particular femininity would attract any man of sufficient intelligence, through sweep of gesture & the unspoken look. That she is not emphatically beautiful -that she may even be perceived as owning a uniquely dour, nearly hounddog face - only amplifies the grace in her willingness to please a man with the intuition to please herself (that she pleases herself and finds that she pleases men reciprocally.) She is womanly, without having to sacrifice any of her dignity, or ape a contrarian spirit; her dignity she holds forth as composure during emotional flurries; she embattles her intellectual heart through a ponderable melancholia; the melancholia in her eyes flash virtue; she is a woman and has not to speak a word for it. With these qualities in mind, Malle decides to metre out the right length for her to achieve her sublimation. A right vehicle, a correct amount of composure, will have to be chosen and doled out. So he selects an obscure novel by an obscure 18th cent. museum director/aesthete favored by Bonaparte, an amateur archaeologist-cum-art historian named Vivant Denon, who dabbled in pornographic sketches of Egyptian monuments & female bodies and wrote one erotic novel, titled Point de lendemain, from which The Lovers derives.

The reason for the material is not evident during the 1st half of the film: since the material has the equanimity & pacing of an 18th century conte, the explications are kept to a minimum. We witness allusions to Madame Bovary, the typical boredom & conventions of married life in the country, the typical comparison in contrast to the 'excitement' and love affair of Parisian life; we know naturally that Louis Malle, a man of quiet intellect & modesty, is aware of this, and uses the form as narrative formality, the dualisms as launchpoints - he is not attempting to say anything original, that isn't his design - we sense that the film functions as both (a) practice for a young director to convey a mature tale by way of classical composition (the Brahms motifs demonstrate as much), and (b) a legerdemain in which classical literary techniques will be subverted, if not embellished, by subtle increments of cinematic performability. The film's beginning motions are measured and composed according to the french standards of classicism - in the Renoir tradition - that insist on compaction of statement. Malle develops little by little a building sense of tension between the two poles that divide Jeanne Moreau's character: Paris & the country estate; her overly romantic, overly ideal spanish polo-playing lover, & her scholastic, detached, slightly pedantic, publishing editor husband. Malle doesn't press the issues too much, and allows Jeanne Moreau to toggle back and forth with feminine glee & sophistication.

The eventual glory of the film's conclusion emanates from the judicious repression of the 1st half: the more restricted & controlled the film's setup appears, the more 'shocking', grandiose, and luxuriant the film's last quarter becomes. The film's narration, voiced by Louise de Vilmorin (who, as a woman, was chosen by Malle perhaps to legitimize the literary emotions felt by Moreau at crucial moments), augments the inevitability of the film's buildup toward sensual revelation. The consummate effect produced at the end, of cinematic purity enjoyed in the extremities of bliss, are meant to be 'calculated' by the use of the voiceover narration at select pressure points, along with the recurrence of Brahms' "Streichsextett, No. 1". The cinematic euphoria felt by the Lovers toward the end, in which Moreau chooses the 3rd man summoned by fate to lead her out of the potential wreckage of the lover/husband dichotomous conflict, knows no equal in film. It is a spectacle to behold that cannot be summed into words; a prolonged orgasm that so distinctly masters the viewer's inhibition by transforming his faith in film into a real love for its splendours, the viewer is left reeling from the intensities of actual physical emotion made palpable in the final scenes. The film is known for the good amount of controversy it aroused in its day, but even now it seems impossible not to surmise that those who were offended at its poetic frankness of sexuality were unfortunate victims of sensual deprivation. There is nothing in this film which does not hail the immensity of love beyond the moral codes of society, beyond the frictions of convention; its triumph is a love for the woman's personal sensation in her inner being. May that woman always be Jeanne Moreau.
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