A young woman marries a young man, much to the disgust of the domineering middle-aged man who used to be her lover. Soon she begins to feel that the marriage does not provide her with the emotional and sexual satisfaction she expected. Meanwhile her younger sister has fallen in love with her new brother-in-law. She sets out to seduce him, dancing and prancing around in ever skimpier clothing. Some very ugly things are about to rear their head - things like adultery, murder, guilt...
As you can tell by the first paragraph, "Amours d'automne" treats some very red-blooded themes, against a general background of vice and decadence. In competent hands, this could have become a good movie - say, a modern Greek tragedy, a compelling psychological drama or an ingenious mystery thriller. But this rarely-seen Belgian movie doesn't amount to anything much. It's probably best described as a tepid, terminally muddled melodrama disfigured by numerous defects and mistakes.
Every now and then it shows promise, but then it crashes to the ground once again. Many of the shortcomings seem to be technical in nature. By way of exhibit A, I point you towards the nightclub scenes early on in the movie : just look at the "Tahitian" number, the song, the partial striptease. (This was the first exotic dancer I ever saw who looked like a cross between a bird of paradise and a porcupine.) Things shudder, things shine, things shake : the sequence looks as though it was filmed by a group of random citizens who barely knew what a camera looked like.
You'll notice too that in "Amours d'automne" much of life happens at strange angles : scenes or characters suddenly incline thirty to forty degrees to the right, and so on.
Mind you, the numerous errors provide the audience with a lot of unintended amusement. I laughed merrily when watching the seduction/rape scene and then again when watching the murder scene - and I'm not the most callous of viewers... Moreover, lovers of female pulchritude get to admire the kid sister, who looks stunning in petticoats and less. The actress involved might even rival a young Brigitte Bardot at the height of her beauty...
As you can tell by the first paragraph, "Amours d'automne" treats some very red-blooded themes, against a general background of vice and decadence. In competent hands, this could have become a good movie - say, a modern Greek tragedy, a compelling psychological drama or an ingenious mystery thriller. But this rarely-seen Belgian movie doesn't amount to anything much. It's probably best described as a tepid, terminally muddled melodrama disfigured by numerous defects and mistakes.
Every now and then it shows promise, but then it crashes to the ground once again. Many of the shortcomings seem to be technical in nature. By way of exhibit A, I point you towards the nightclub scenes early on in the movie : just look at the "Tahitian" number, the song, the partial striptease. (This was the first exotic dancer I ever saw who looked like a cross between a bird of paradise and a porcupine.) Things shudder, things shine, things shake : the sequence looks as though it was filmed by a group of random citizens who barely knew what a camera looked like.
You'll notice too that in "Amours d'automne" much of life happens at strange angles : scenes or characters suddenly incline thirty to forty degrees to the right, and so on.
Mind you, the numerous errors provide the audience with a lot of unintended amusement. I laughed merrily when watching the seduction/rape scene and then again when watching the murder scene - and I'm not the most callous of viewers... Moreover, lovers of female pulchritude get to admire the kid sister, who looks stunning in petticoats and less. The actress involved might even rival a young Brigitte Bardot at the height of her beauty...
