The Lovers (1958)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The loving ones |
| Original title | Les Amants |
| Country of production | France |
| original language | French |
| Publishing year | 1958 |
| length | 90 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 0 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Louis Malle |
| script | Louis Malle, Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin |
| production | Louis Malle |
| music | Johannes Brahms |
| camera | Henri Decaë |
| cut | Léonide Azar |
| occupation | |
| |
The lovers (original title: Les Amants ) is a feature film by the French director Louis Malle with Jeanne Moreau from 1958. It is based (unnamed) on the novella Nur ein Nacht (original title: Point de lendemain ) by Vivant Denon .
action
Jeanne Tournier is married to the wealthy publisher Henri Tournier. Henri neglects his wife and spends most of the time in his print shop. With the agreement of her husband, Jeanne visits her friend Maggy in Paris about once a month to have fun. There she met the successful, handsome and charming polo player Raoul Flores. Her advances flatter her. Torn between the rural dreariness of their marriage and the supposedly auspicious life around Maggy and Raoul, Jeanne travels more and more to Paris, which arouses increasing distrust and jealousy in Henri. He therefore invites Jeanne's friends to join him. Jeanne then goes to Paris to invite the two of them, even if she is afraid of the two men meeting.
The two of them agree, and Jeanne leaves a few hours before them to receive the guests in the evening. On the way, however, she broke down on her car and had to ask an archeology student Bernard, an archeology student, to take her with him. Finally at home, Maggy and Raoul are already there and are talking to Jeanne's husband Henri in the garden. He urges the helpful Bernard to stay the night and take part in the joint dinner, although Bernard, as a simple student, apparently does not fit into the publisher's high society villa and is treated rather derogatory by everyone. The dinner together then finally turns into a debacle for Jeanne - as feared: Henri plays a husband in love to humiliate his rival; Raoul, without fighting for Jeanne, reveals herself to be a superficial, mindless babbler, and Maggy as a stupid, fashion-defying, equally mindless woman.
For Jeanne, both her old married life, which can no longer be lived, as well as her second, apparently glamorous, but also basically empty and seemingly beautiful life collapse. When she heard loud music from the library that night - which Bernard was allowed to stay in at Henri's invitation - she ran downstairs, but saw no one. After turning the music down and assuming that the guest has already gone to sleep, she runs into the garden to escape the oppressive weight of the house.
In the garden she meets Bernard, whom she initially harshly rejects, but who is persistently interested in her and wants to have a serious conversation with her. He dispenses with empty phrases and superficiality, rather criticizes Jeanne openly for her wrong life plans, just as he detests the other people from Jeanne's environment for their affected and "inflated" manner. The two fall in love “at a single glance”, as the authorial female voice from the off calls it, and experience a long and intense night of love in which it seems to them that they have always known each other and that they are now all dreams and unfulfilled desires of her life come true.
The next morning they both leave together without explaining to the others and drive in Bernard's duck into the unknown of a promising, but uncertain and above all unknown future. However, while Bernard seems to enjoy the present happiness unbroken, Jeanne experiences the detachment from her old life and her false, mask-like self as a painful process. But both are sure they are doing the right thing.
Appreciation and reception
At the center of the film is the detailed staging of the love scene between Jeanne and Bernard, accompanied by ecstatic chamber music by Johannes Brahms , who keep saying: “I love you!” - “I really love you!” In contrast to this “absolute” Unconditional love represents the emptiness and mask-like character of bourgeois high society , which Malle portrays both in its cynical- conservative (husband Henri) and in its hedonistic, ostentatious form (Peggy, Raoul) as superficial and inwardly frozen.
By portraying the adultery of a mother leaving her family for a young man, and by emphasizing the convention- breaking character of love, the film caused a scandal when it first appeared in the 1950s . The US Supreme Court had to deal with an obscenity complaint […], although the film is by no means sexually explicit by today's standards.
In order not to show that Jeanne is leaving her little daughter in addition to her husband, the German distribution company eliminated all scenes with the child from the film. A sequence that shows the couple in the bathtub together and the suggestion that cunnilingus is practiced during lovemaking have also been cut out. German television later restored the full version.
Although Die Liebenden did not become very well known in Germany, the film was one of Male's best-known works internationally and cemented his reputation as an important director of the Nouvelle Vague . At the Venice Film Festival in 1958 , Die Liebenden was awarded the “Special Jury Prize” and was nominated for the Golden Lion . A year later Alain Cuny was honored as best actor with the French film award Étoile de Cristal .
The film service writes about the film:
“Malle staged his second feature film with ironic precision and a poetic, romantic delicacy. In contrast to his evaluation as an 'erotic scandal film' at the time of the premiere, his remarkable artistic qualities are still convincing today. "
Supreme Court judgment
The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1963 on Jacobellis v. Ohio (378 US 184), not that the film "obscene" (Engl .: obscene ), and therefore by the 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is protected. Previously, Nico Jacobellis, who showed the film in his theater, was found guilty by an Ohio court . The Ohio Supreme Court upheld the verdict until it was ultimately overturned.
Judge Potter Stewart's statement " I know it when I see it " in the reason for his special opinion became one of the most famous quotes from the Supreme Court. Stewart stated that hard core pornography is not protected by the Constitution, and while he cannot give a definition for this type of content, The Lovers does not fall under it.
“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ['hard-core pornography']; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. "
"I'm not going to try any further today to define the type of content that I see encompassed by this description ['hard core pornography']; and maybe I could never do this in a clear way. But I know when I see it in front of me, and the film in this case doesn't belong to that type of content. "
Others
The soundtrack is the string sextet Opus 18 in B flat major (2nd movement) by Johannes Brahms .
literature
- Vivant Denon : Just one night (original title: Point de lendemain ). German by Otfried Schulze. With illustrations by Frank Bornemann, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-596-13841-8 .
Web links
- The lovers in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Review by Patrick Garson (English) at sensesofcinema.com
- Short review at xenix.ch
Individual evidence
- ↑ FSK.de - Die Liebenden Release Certificate , accessed on February 29, 2020
- ↑ See Sense of Cinema: Review .
- ↑ Tom Dawson, BBC Film Reviews, quoted in n. stadtkinobasel.ch ( Memento from September 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 2.1 MB).
- ↑ The lovers. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed December 10, 2016 .
- ^ Judgment in full text on Wikisource
- ↑ Paul Gewirtz, "On 'I Know It When I See It'", Yale Law Journal , Vol. 105, pp. 1023-1047 (1996)