"Marriage a la mode " ,in the wake of the events of May 68 ,means cohabitation ;the marriage behing now a bourgeois institution which is to be dismissed ....
This movie bears all the appropriate scars of the time, all the available clichés about the after-68 zeitgeist ;a girl,stifling in her provinces,heads off for Paris ,leaving her journalist/partner behind ,but with her other boyfriend with whom she exchanges fortune cookie philosophies about the mean bourgeois way of life .
Of course,when we arrive in Paris ,the first picture we see in the Place saint Michel in the latin quarter.Then the screenplay (based on a book by the director)becomes loose ,desultory ,patchy , aping the worst aspects of the Nouvelle Vaguelette ,a decade before .
The actors playing is amateurish :Yves Beneyton was a specialist of this kind of flick dealing with cult of youth ,fake rebellion (see also "les jeunes loups" by Marcel Carné who disowned this bomb of his);Catherine Jourdan ,who resembled Mia Farrow ,enjoyed a short-lived glory in the erotic "l'Eden Et Après " by nouveau roman writer/director Alain Robbe -Grillet and fell into oblivion afterward-.Add a ludicrous lesbian character , the heroine meets in front of Fauchon grocery ,one of the most expensive places in Paris :anti-bourgeois indeed!
In its last third, the story becomes as far-fetched as never:whilst the heroine becomes a photographer in a vacation village in North Africa (we know it because there are camels),her boyfriend is hospitalized because he has pleurisy :there , the head doctor does not seem to care a little bit for his bedridden patients.
Why on earth did Geraldine Chaplin have to get involved in that business?
This movie bears all the appropriate scars of the time, all the available clichés about the after-68 zeitgeist ;a girl,stifling in her provinces,heads off for Paris ,leaving her journalist/partner behind ,but with her other boyfriend with whom she exchanges fortune cookie philosophies about the mean bourgeois way of life .
Of course,when we arrive in Paris ,the first picture we see in the Place saint Michel in the latin quarter.Then the screenplay (based on a book by the director)becomes loose ,desultory ,patchy , aping the worst aspects of the Nouvelle Vaguelette ,a decade before .
The actors playing is amateurish :Yves Beneyton was a specialist of this kind of flick dealing with cult of youth ,fake rebellion (see also "les jeunes loups" by Marcel Carné who disowned this bomb of his);Catherine Jourdan ,who resembled Mia Farrow ,enjoyed a short-lived glory in the erotic "l'Eden Et Après " by nouveau roman writer/director Alain Robbe -Grillet and fell into oblivion afterward-.Add a ludicrous lesbian character , the heroine meets in front of Fauchon grocery ,one of the most expensive places in Paris :anti-bourgeois indeed!
In its last third, the story becomes as far-fetched as never:whilst the heroine becomes a photographer in a vacation village in North Africa (we know it because there are camels),her boyfriend is hospitalized because he has pleurisy :there , the head doctor does not seem to care a little bit for his bedridden patients.
Why on earth did Geraldine Chaplin have to get involved in that business?
