Les amants or The Lovers is the second feature by Louis Malle and the breakthrough of the famous French actress Jeanne Moreau, who now has worked with such filmmakers as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Orson Welles. The Lovers is a movie that was ahead of its time, which made it hard for people of 1958 to understand it. For example in my home country, Finland the film was roughly edited and bowdlerized and the American distributor of it got a charge for pornography. It's a very erotic tragedy (or a comedy?) about lovers.
Jeanne is living a safe bourgeois life with her husband. They have a big house, a servant and a couple of intellectual friends - to one of whom Jeanne falls in love with. One day when Jeanne is traveling to Paris to have an appointment with her lover, Raoul her car breaks down and a stranger comes and offers a helping hand. Eventually a loving bond starts to build between the stranger and Jeanne - will she leave her husband and lover for this strangers she has fall in love with? Louis Malle brilliantly builds up this ironic tragicomedy; a woman who cheats his husband with another man, whom she's also cheating. The film is full of erotic charge - firstly only on the level of gestures, narrative and expressions. But eventually the charge starts to set free and the subtle quiet sexuality turns into "sinful perversion". The imagery we see in The Lovers isn't harsh and it's very hard for us to believe that some people have actually seen it as pornography. But when one looks at the history of cinema and especially the sexuality in cinema - Louis Malle took a huge step. Europeans were light years ahead of Americans in this; De Sica, Bergman, Nouvelle Vague etc.
Sexuality on the screen has always interested me as it has film fanatics, critics, researchers and historians. Today David Lynch can be seen as one of the biggest developers of it. The way how The Lovers goes from a subtle, elegant sexuality to a wild primitive sexuality is gorgeous and the reason behind it makes the change seem even bigger. First Jeanne is living a relationship of Loveless love, she changes to another man, but still cannot find true love love. Because both of the men are living the same lie with her, the illusion, the bourgeois life. When she meets a working class man and starts this scary, wild, but loving affair she is able to find true love.
Jeanne is living a safe bourgeois life with her husband. They have a big house, a servant and a couple of intellectual friends - to one of whom Jeanne falls in love with. One day when Jeanne is traveling to Paris to have an appointment with her lover, Raoul her car breaks down and a stranger comes and offers a helping hand. Eventually a loving bond starts to build between the stranger and Jeanne - will she leave her husband and lover for this strangers she has fall in love with? Louis Malle brilliantly builds up this ironic tragicomedy; a woman who cheats his husband with another man, whom she's also cheating. The film is full of erotic charge - firstly only on the level of gestures, narrative and expressions. But eventually the charge starts to set free and the subtle quiet sexuality turns into "sinful perversion". The imagery we see in The Lovers isn't harsh and it's very hard for us to believe that some people have actually seen it as pornography. But when one looks at the history of cinema and especially the sexuality in cinema - Louis Malle took a huge step. Europeans were light years ahead of Americans in this; De Sica, Bergman, Nouvelle Vague etc.
Sexuality on the screen has always interested me as it has film fanatics, critics, researchers and historians. Today David Lynch can be seen as one of the biggest developers of it. The way how The Lovers goes from a subtle, elegant sexuality to a wild primitive sexuality is gorgeous and the reason behind it makes the change seem even bigger. First Jeanne is living a relationship of Loveless love, she changes to another man, but still cannot find true love love. Because both of the men are living the same lie with her, the illusion, the bourgeois life. When she meets a working class man and starts this scary, wild, but loving affair she is able to find true love.