Eva (1962)

***
Country: France-Italy
Director: Joseph Losey

Last week in a post on The Criminal I discussed David Thomson's idea that the early films of Joseph Losey combine the contrary qualities of hysteria and subtlety. None of his early work I've seen, though, contains such extremes of those two qualities as his 1962 film Eva (originally released in the US in a truncated version called Eve). Moreover, while in Losey's early work these two opposites tend to be fully synthesized, here they remain curiously separate, the element of hysteria pretty well confined to the movie's plot, the element of subtlety found largely in Losey's impressive direction. It's almost as though he realized that the events of the film were so outlandish that only a subdued presentation had any chance of putting them over successfully. The nearly schizophrenic result is one of Losey's most restrained jobs of directing in one of his most dramatically excessive pictures.

The film opens in Venice during the film festival there. A writer, Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker), who has just had a big success with his first novel, is attending because the book has been adapted into a movie that is being exhibited at the festival. When his fiancée Francesca (Virna Lisi), a production assistant to the film's director, has to travel to Rome for a production conference, he returns to his house on Torcello to find that a mysterious woman, Eva Olivier (Jeanne Moreau), has broken into the house and is occupying his bed. The aloof Eva teases him, tempts him, rejects him, then finally seduces him. This is only the beginning of a relationship in which this pattern of heartless treatment by Eva continues with complete unpredictability, even after Tyvian and Francesca have married, until she has wrecked his marriage, his self-esteem, his mental equanimity, in short his entire life—all apparently just for the hell of it.

As played by Stanley Baker, Tyvian, a former Welsh coal miner, is a confident, ultra-masculine man, a working-class intellectual with a brutish streak who drinks too much and is not above pushing people around to get his way. He seems genuinely to love Francesca, but the arrival of Eva in his life creates a situation in which he finds himself pulled in opposing directions. On the one hand, the gentle Francesca inspires in him the striving toward a more noble and sensitive nature than, aside from Francesca, others perceive in him. On the other hand, the sudden presence of Eva in his life begins to strip away his self-control and his civilized veneer. Under her corrosive influence he becomes a self-centered, id-driven man blindly willing to destroy in order to satisfy urges he cannot withstand. Worse, she causes him to strip off the mask he presents to others and confront what he has successfully concealed from everyone else—that he is in truth an impostor, a fraud passing off the writing of someone else as his own.

Jeanne Moreau plays Eva with ferocious intensity, pulling out all the stops to portray the most wantonly predatory temptress seen on the screen since Dietrich's Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel. She acts like a dangerous drug on Tyvian—irresistible, addictive, and ultimately destructive. She manipulates him, lies to him, and humiliates him. Her one object seems to be to control him. Why she does this and why she focuses her toxic attention on Tyvian and not someone else is never explained. The most that can be said is that if she is his addiction, then her power over him is her own addiction.

The motivation of her actions may be enigmatic, but her dedication to purpose and the disastrous effect of those actions are plain. On the moral level, the film is a tale of the competition for a man's soul, with the benign influence of Francesca losing out to the corrupting influence of Eva. Once she has him under her control, she does not stop until she has razed his soul. Tyvian may appear too well-armored a personality to be vulnerable to Eva, but she senses the chinks in that armor and is able to get inside, to find his weaknesses and exploit them to cast him out of his Venetian Paradise. With her seductive poses and magnificent face—her huge eyes, swollen lips, and nearly immobile expression—Moreau makes an imposing presence, dominating the screen like a glacial goddess of destruction.


Losey almost seems to use the film as an opportunity to pay homage to the two men who were at the time the supreme masters of Italian cinema—Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. He combines the narrative histrionics and character eccentricities of Fellini with the cool, precise, deliberately paced visual style of Antonioni. He is aided in this by his cinematographer, Gianni di Venanzo, who photographed some of the greatest films of those two masters. (The camera operator is the soon-to-be renowned Pasqualino de Santis, and the great New Wave cinematographer Henri Decaë did uncredited additional photography, the film festival scenes early in the picture.) The film is a visual treat, each sequence planned in painstaking detail and executed with remarkable but unshowy artistry.

One sequence that especially stands out for me takes place near the end of the picture when Tyvian follows the drunken Eva home from the casino in Venice after she has ignored him there. He lurks outside her building and when she comes home watches her as she moves through her second-storey flat. Losey films this sequence from Tyvian's point of view, the camera in the street outside, level with the windows. As Eva enters the darkened flat, the camera follows her, tracking laterally and framing her in the windows as she progresses from one room to the next, turning on the lights in each room as she enters it. The effect is to transform her flat into the equivalent of a theater stage set. It's a masterful blend of lighting, movement, and voyeurism that ends with Tyvian climbing into the flat from the balcony and the outraged Eve pushing him through the window onto a heap of garbage in the street below.

David Thomson is hugely enthusiastic about Eva, calling it "one of the great lost films of all time." I wouldn't go that far myself. It is at times quite melodramatic, a touch too obvious in its Biblical parallels, and rather simplistic in its moral alternatives. But it certainly is something to behold, with such a virile presence as Baker so thoroughly unmanned by the malignant Moreau, whose Eva must be included among those signature performances of the late fifties and early sixties that form the basis of her cinema legacy.

You might also like:
• The Lovers (1958)
• Bay of Angels (1963)
• The Criminal (1960)
• These Are the Damned (1963)

Note: The copy of Eva I got from Netflix, released by Kino, contained both the theatrical release version and the longer director's version, which is the one I watched. Both the picture quality and the sound quality were only fair. The picture was on the fuzzy side and the outdoor scenes often appeared washed out. The DVD transfer was apparently made from a Swedish copy, because I could find no way to turn off the Swedish subtitles. This was a minor annoyance during the occasional brief conversation in Italian, which was translated into Swedish in the subtitles. The only help for Anglophones was that the subject of these conversations was sometimes alluded to in the English-language dialogue.

The Lovers (1958)

***
Country: France
Director: Louis Malle

Even though Louis Malle was a contemporary of Truffaut, Godard, and Resnais and began directing films in the late 1950s, just as the New Wave began to dominate French filmmaking, I've never really thought of him as part of that movement. His first movie, Elevator to the Gallows (1957), with its nod to the anarchy of American films like They Live by Night and Gun Crazy in its subplot of young punks on a crime spree, did bear a resemblance to the early work of Godard and Truffaut. But his next projects were all quite different from one another—what David Thomson refers to as his "moving rather aimlessly from one subject to another"—and for the rest of his long career he never seemed to settle into a favored theme or easily identifiable style. The Lovers strikes me as almost his version of the Douglas Sirk women's pictures of the 1950s and reminds me in some ways of the film I think of as the archetypal Sirk movie of that kind, All That Heaven Allows.

The credits of The Lovers open over a map, which looks as though it might date from an earlier century, of an estate with a large lake labeled Lac de l'Indifférence in the the middle (the Criterion website identifies this as the Carte du tendre, "a 'map' of amorous relations drawn by Madeleine de Scudéry in the seventeenth century"), and with sensuous music of Brahms playing on the soundtrack. In some ways, the movie plays like an update of a romantic novel of the 19th century—Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, for example. (According to various sources, the film is loosely derived from a French novel, Point de Lendemain by Dominique Vivant, published in 1777.) In The Lovers, Jeanne Moreau plays a character not unlike Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, Jeanne Tournier, the young wife of an older man, Henri Tournier (Alain Cuny), the publisher of the major newspaper in Dijon. Trapped in a dull, loveless marriage to a man engrossed in his career and marooned in a remote country house, Jeanne is the epitome of the bored, neglected, and aimless upper middle-class housewife.

She has a daughter whom she appears to love, but who is cared for largely by her nanny. The house, almost a mini-château, is her husband's family home staffed by longtime family servants, and she has little to do with the running of it, her role limited to things like planning the menus. She lives for her frequent visits to Paris, where she stays with her rich friend Maggy doing the things idle women of their social class do to pass the time—shopping for clothes, getting her hair done, going to nightclubs, and carrying on an affair with Raoul Flores (José Villalonga), a polo player. When Jeanne's husband persuades her to invite Maggy and Raoul for the weekend, the scene seems to be set for a country weekend psychodrama. But the unforeseen happens when Jeanne's car breaks down on the way home on the day her friends are to arrive, and unable to get it repaired, she accepts a ride home from a young archaeologist, Bernard (Jean-Marc Bory), whom her husband invites to spend the night also.

Malle and Moreau emphasize the satiric possibilities in Jeanne and her lifestyle, painting a sardonically exaggerated picture of a vapid woman living a life of mindless consumerism. Appropriately, this part of the film minimizes narrative incident to concentrate instead on surfaces and appearances, and as photographed by the great Henri Decaë, those appear immaculately polished and ordered. Jeanne's house looks like an illustration from a glossy coffee table book on the traditional French country house, and Moreau, costumed and coiffed in the most chic manner imaginable, looks sensational. Her style-worshiping Jeanne, preoccupied with her image, what she calls her genre, is at once ridiculous and pathetic—ridiculous in her obsession with the superficial, pathetic in her blindness to the shallowness and aridity of her life. Her devotion to the trivial reaches its fullest and most comic expression on the way back to her home with Bernard—he refuses to drive any faster, saying "J'ai horreur de la vitesse" (I have a dread of speed)—in her petulant agitation that she will be late for the arrival of her best friend and lover.

That evening, when Jeanne, feeling vaguely unsettled, wanders outside for a moonlight stroll dressed in her nightgown and still wearing her pearls from dinner, she unexpectedly encounters the hunky young intellectual who until now has only irritated her with his nonconformity and his ridicule of her bourgeois values. As he pursues her through the garden, the atmosphere becomes charged with a surging current of eroticism, and her dislike of him gradually transforms into something she at first doesn't acknowledge but soon surrenders herself to: sexual attraction. At this point the film switches gears completely and becomes a voluptuous, ultra-romantic love story with a seduction in a rowboat on that ironically named Lake of Indifference, followed by a night of rapturous lovemaking in Jeanne's room. The sudden, almost disjunctive tonal contrast between this part of the film and what preceded it is the one element of The Lovers that places it squarely in the tradition of the New Wave.
Even with the floridly romantic tone of this part of the movie, it's obvious that Jeanne's attraction to Bernard is not only emotional but strongly physical and that the main thing missing from her life, and which until this point she seems to have been completely unaware of, is sexual fulfillment. Today this may seem innocuous enough, but in the 1950s it was sufficient to make The Lovers highly controversial, causing a stir both when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival and when it opened commercially in France. In the U.S. it was banned in Ohio, becoming the subject of a court case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which overturned the ban. The sex isn't even explicit (although there is a clear suggestion that Bernard introduces Jeanne to oral sex), but that, combined with the subversive idea that women actually have sex drives like men, was enough to make the film as notorious as D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterly's Lover had been in its day.

If this kind of plot was hardly new territory for the movies, the attitudes expressed in the film were. In the movies, a woman who behaved in this way—who abandoned her husband, children, and stable middle-class existence for the thrill of a sexual fling—typically had to pay for her transgression of prevailing societal values. Sexual fulfillment was shown to be transient and ultimately meaningless, and the affair was fated to end badly. Malle was having none of this, though. In The Lovers, sexual fulfillment is equated with emotional fulfillment, and at the conclusion of the film Jeanne tells us that even if it doesn't last, she doesn't care. Ultimately, the most shocking thing to viewers in the 1950s might not have been the film's candor about sexuality, but the threat implicit in its rejection of the traditional notion that women achieve satisfaction through marriage, children, and conformity to the chaste and repressive behavioral ideals of the time.

Bay of Angels (1963)

***^½
Country: France
Director: Jacques Demy

"Of all the New Wave directors who once professed their joy in cinema, Demy remained most faithful to the delights of sight and sound and to the romance of movie iconography."

—David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

Bay of Angels opens with an iris shot of Jeanne Moreau striding purposefully down the seafront promenade at Nice early in the morning, the camera tracking in front of her and slowly away from her. After a few moments the iris opens out to a full-screen shot, lush piano-and-orchestra music wells up on the soundtrack, and as the credits begin, the camera speeds away in a burst of surging momentum that matches that of Michel Legrand's theme music until Moreau disappears in the distance. The whole shot, which lasts a little more than a minute, is one of those that makes you ask yourself even as you watch it, "How did they do ever that?" (My best guess: the camera operator was in the back seat of a convertible with the camera mounted on the trunk of the car as it raced down the promenade.)

After this opening credit sequence, the tone of the film changes completely as the location shifts to Paris, where we meet Jean Fournier (Claude Mann), a staid young man in his early twenties who works as a bank clerk and lives a sedate life with his widowed father. After a co-worker confesses to Jean that he is a compulsive gambler and invites Jean to accompany him to the casino at Enghien near Paris, Jean sees a means of escape from his dull, conventional life. When his vacation comes up, he seizes his chance to "break out" by defying his father and heading for the Riviera and its casinos for a gambling holiday. In the casino he meets Jackie Lemaistre (Jeanne Moreau), a chain-smoking, careworn-looking denizen of the casino who appears to be in her early thirties, and for the next two weeks the two embark on an impromptu love affair and gambling spree that takes them from Nice to Monte Carlo and back again.


Like many of the early French New Wave films—Breathless, The Lovers, Jules and Jim, Pierrot le Fou—Bay of Angels is about what the French call l'amour fou—crazy, wild, impulsive love. Here it's a case of the sexual attraction of opposite personalities. The difference in their natures is apparent from their behavior in the casino, Jean quietly observant and methodical in contrast to Jackie's fervent concentration and capricious spontaneity. It's easy to see the appeal of the impetuous Jackie to a strait-laced, inexperienced young man like Jean, but less easy to fathom the attraction Jean holds for her. Is he simply a docile protégé? A companion in her folly? A convenient source of betting money when she runs out?

He may be all those things at first, but as the film proceeds and we learn more about Jackie, we begin to see that she might actually have a deep emotional need for him. In her life Jackie has lost all: she has sacrificed her rich husband, her young son, her friends to her all-consuming passion for gambling. Demy has said he wanted to make a film that showed gambling as an addiction, like alcohol or drugs. It is true that Jackie seems to have no control over her obsessive need to gamble, yet like much addictive behavior, her gambling seems not so much a weakness of character or a disease as a kind of self-medication, a desperate attempt to erase life's pain by immersion in some sort of compulsive behavior.

The more she tells Jean about herself, the more we see that despite her vivacity, she seems to be trying to escape something—a sense of failure and inadequacy, an inability to achieve any sort of stability in her life, or perhaps the haunting possibility that her life has no significance outside the casino. Highly strung, mercurial, irresponsible, Jackie is all hyperkinetic emotionalism. You can see this in the way she walks down the promenade in that opening shot. Her whole approach to life is like her walk: she moves with the purpose of a person on her way to an important rendezvous, yet she is obviously heading nowhere.

For Jackie, life is lived completely in the moment. Win or lose, risk is all. Every moment of her life is simply a temporary stop on her way up or down, and her destiny is never to arrive anywhere. What she seems to be avoiding even at the peril of self-destruction is stasis. Tellingly, her preferred game is roulette, the wheel pausing only briefly before it resumes its perpetual spin, for in Jackie's world, the only thing of importance—both literally and metaphorically—is the next spin of the wheel. Jackie quickly becomes the center of the movie, and Moreau seizes the role for all it's worth, giving a fierce performance reminiscent of those by the most intense American actresses of the studio era such as Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck. Like Davis and Stanwyck at their most incandescent, Moreau suggests that although Jackie is a damaged woman life-hardened on the outside, she still harbors deep within her a vulnerability that can be reached by a naïf like Jean.

Moreau's real co-star in the film is her director, Jacques Demy. Unlike some New Wave directors, though, Demy never tries to upstage his actors and his story with self-indulgent stylistics. Demy dedicated his first film, Lola (1961), to Max Ophüls, in part for Ophüls' renowned use of tracking and crane shots. Although he clearly favors such shots, Demy uses them in a more restrained, less baroque manner than Ophüls, who specialized in period pictures. Still, the key characteristic of Demy's visual style is the sensuous, balletic fluidity of his camera. In a single shot Demy holds the camera in place, pans, and tracks for as long as possible, finally cutting only when absolutely necessary. These lengthy, precisely choreographed shots result in a flowing narrative technique of hypnotic beauty, the whole film in a sense a nearly continuous pas de deux between the camera and the actors.

The other inspiration Demy takes from Ophüls is devotion to the belief in both the destructive and the redemptive power of love. Bay of Angels ends abruptly and rather ambiguously, with Jackie storming away from Jean in the casino after an argument. Jean hesitates briefly then follows her outside and takes her in his arms, and after resisting a moment, Jackie surrenders to his embrace. The film ends with no clear indication of the future course of the relationship. Will Jean's love act as a calmative on the erratic Jackie, or will his placidity be overwhelmed by her galvanic energy? Demy leaves it entirely up to the viewer to decide what comes next. But for the moment at least, Jean's love seems to have subdued the chaos in Jackie.