Directed by Marc Allégret • Drama • With Jean Marais, Brigitte Bardot, Isabelle Pia, Yves Robert • 1955 • 96 minutes
Brigitte Bardot was only 20 when she starred in this adaptation of a 1920 Vicki Baum novel. She’s Sophie, one of a platoon of young music conservatory students in postwar Vienna, but the one that stands out, especially to the head singing teacher Walter (Jean Marais), whose real love is his wife, a famous and unstable diva (Denise Noel), but who routinely dallies with his more beautiful students. The story details the hothouse triangle between the saucy and self-confident Sophie, Walter, and a third student, Elis (Isabelle Pia), a talented but melancholic blonde from a troubled home whom no one realizes is nearing the brink of suicide.
The scenario is distinctly pre-#MeToo, allowing Allégret and his co-screenwriter Roger Vadim (Mr. Bardot at this point) to treat the sexual-romantic gamesmanship with a degree of ambivalence – the girls are naturally besotted with their celebrity prof, and vulnerable, but the melodrama turns on the girls eventually banding together and stepping out of the Lothario’s orbit. The cinematography by Robert Julliard (veteran of Rossellini and Clouzot) deftly captures not only Bardot’s traffic-stopping cat eyes and sensuality, but the workaday details of a ritzy Old World music school, and the epic poshness of Vienna in wintertime.
Up Next in France Before the New Wave
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24 Hours in the Life of a Clown (Jean...
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville • Documentary • 1946 • 19 minutes
In Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1946 film debut, we follow aging circus clown Beby, from one night’s performance to the next. After the show, Beby eats the same spaghetti dinner his wife has been preparing for decades, lingers over fon...
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Lady Chatterley's Lover
Directed by Marc Allégret • Drama • With Danielle Darrieux, Leo Genn, Erno Crisa, Jean Murat • 1955 • 100 minutes
This is the first film of D.H. Lawrence’s controversial novel, which premiered in 1955, five years before the uncensored novel even appeared in print in the UK. Danielle Darrieux (in...
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Travels in the Congo (Voyage au Congo)
Directed by Marc Allégret • Documentary • 1927 • 117 minutes
In 1925, Marc Allégret accompanied André Gide on a journey to French Equatorial Africa, the Congo, as his secretary, and novice filmmaker. Filming throughout their 11-month travels, and only three years after Nanook of the North, Allég...
