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Les Amants The Truth of Love
Yet, for Jeanne, without necessarily willing it, events take their turn and suddenly there it is: true love or perhaps the truth of love. However it is put, the subject of Malle’s exploration is more the nature of truth in love rather than just love itself. Every single frame contains a subtle moral challenge to the audience – are the characters behaving truly or falsely? In Moreau’s exquisite portrayal, Jeanne’s discomfort is tangible as she hob-nobs with the Parisian socialites, imagining being in love while her inner sincerity resists the amorous advances of the debonair and besotted Raoul. Despite encouragements from her jovial but cynical friend Maguy, Jeanne remains disquietingly unconvinced. Her preference to seek the distractions of the party crowd rather than intimacy with Raoul is a telling moment, revealing the futility of his approaches because we can see that nothing he can do will make Jeanne truly love him. His obvious wealth and sporting prowess mean nothing in this sense. Yet he for his turn appears to be genuinely in love. He desires her but Malle points out that being in love is not love itself. Her time of diversions in Paris is actually a form of escape from the emotional drudgery and the disinterestedness of her husband, played as a dour complex character by Alain Cluny. Here too, love or at least the sense of familial attachment is feigned by the presence of all its trappings: a gorgeous mansion, the provincial setting, the well mannered daughter and her governess. Malle presents these scenes in great detail to point out that there is no lack of civility here nor any lack of goodwill but the domestic formality is underscored by deep jealousy. This would seem unreasonable given the strong suggestion that the husband is having an affair with his secretary whilst we know for certain that she has been dallying with Raoul, but the film hints that jealousy is provoked by the insistence on role playing rather than love. Having thus established the setting, Malle begins the immensely entertaining scenes of the romance. Malle observes thats love is not unstructured, that love is somehow circumstantial but also logical in how it is only possible when two people are naturally frank to each other. Love offers its possibility in duality; the duality of the two beings, the duality of gender and the duality of purpose in the intertwined actions of being loved and loving. However, the resolution of these dualities is observed as being singular, binding and above all sincere. It manifests as the liberation of one individual spirit from its material condition to its fulfilled state (passion) through its complete acceptance by the beloved other. Malle presents plenty of allusions to this transformation. There is a new carefree spirit in Jeanne right from the moment she meets her lover to be - who for all intents and purposes is presented as just another ordinary, albeit sensitive, fellow. In closing the scene of their chance meeting, the camera lingers on her broken down car parked on the side of the road. The metaphor of reckless abandonment is complete with the passenger doors which are left hanging open as the newly-met couple leave the scene. The fairytale-like fulfillment sequences are delightful in their cinematography, both in the way the scenes are acted and photographed. There are sumptious scenes of enchantment in the moonlit garden. The eroticism in the love scene is supple and real, performed with much delicacy and subtlety extending without any sentimentalism into the difficult hours of the sleepless dawn when the tension of reality returns. Malle is brutally direct in his handling of the lovers’ waking hours as they decide to leave everything and start a new life together. What will happen to these two heroic souls? Malle sets them out on the road in the small Citroen. They look tired. Jeanne rests her head trustingly on the shoulder of her lover. Love, we are bound to believe, will somehow find a way. Rome, 20 May 2004
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Have you seen a better film than Louis Malle’s
masterful Les Amants ,“The Lovers”? The film is at once a fairytale, a love story, social commentary and a parable. Jeanne Moreau is splendid as the bored upper middle class housewife who is also called Jeanne. Her situation is, in effect, a typical modern marriage with its usual undertones of failed expectations: something which, in real life, people tend to overcome because desires for change face practical obstacles. It’s better to stick to what one knows rather than risk alienation from domestic comforts in pursuit of mysterious inner passions.