Les liaisons dangereuses (Roger Vadim, 1959)

One of the best films about heartlessness ever made, largely because of the fine work of Jeanne Moreau as Juliette and Gérard Philipe as Valmont. The story is taken a long way from the 18th-century roman of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, but the dynamics are surprisingly faithful.. Setting most of the action at a ski resort is especially brilliant, because it’s at once full of glamour and quite enclosed. For a while the film seems to be a sort of sex comedy, especially with the seduction of the young cousin Cecile (Jeanne Valérie), who is in love with fellow student Danceny (Jean-Louis Trintignant) but engaged to an exceedingly dull fellow chosen by her family. Cecile is very comely, and the post-seduction scene when she lies nude on her stomach doing her geometry homework and Valmont rests the textbook on her bum—it’s sweet and amusing.

Inevitably, the whole thing turns sour when Juliette steals Danceny and forces Valmont to abandon the virtuous Marianne (Annette Vadim) with whom he’s actually fallen in love. Moreau is strong and beautiful and twisted, a tour-de-force acting job. At last, an angry Danceny strikes despairing but still glamorous Valmont, who falls and hits his head on an andiron and dies. Juliette accidentally sets her clothing on fire trying to burn their awful letters. Marianne goes mad when she learns of Valmont’s death, and with a trance-like smile talks softly about the imaginary home they might have had together. "Rose, rose..." she murmurs.

The photography is really fine, and the best additional thing is the wonderful music by Thelonius Monk and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. It’s even better than I’d remembered it from many years ago. Watching this makes the American versions--Dangerous Liaisons and Cruel Intentions seem all the more flat and bland and listless.

Breathless / À Bout de souffle (Jean Luc Godard, 1960)

Jean-Paul Belmondo as an attractive criminal, Michel, with a fondness for Bogart. He drifts into crime rather casually, as when he casually shoots a policeman pursuing the car Michel has stolen—Michel just happens to find a gun in the glove compartment. He has a vague romantic attachment to the American girl Patricia (Jean Seberg), who is even vaguer still. She’s brisk and pretty in her close-cropped fair hair and sailor-striped shirt and her American-accented French. The famous “honesty” of this film must stem from the fact that both lovers speak a good deal about how uncertain they are about whether they love each other, though they do.

This is not at all a conventional crime drama, because there’s very little dash and bravado–just free-floating charm. And this charm is peculiar because it’s so ambivalent. In the end, Patricia turns Michel in to the police. Why? Apparently it is supposed a means of discovering if she really loves him. It’s complicated, but it works something like this: how can she know whether she really does love Michel? If she betrays him, the act of betrayal would be especially méchant, and if she feels sufficiently terrible she will know she loves him, and if not, well then. This means of testing love is complicated and sophisticated and poetic and more than any of these qualities, stupid. Michel disdains escape. He’s tired, he says, and wants to sleep, though perhaps not to die, and yet he does die. The police on the scene misrepresent his last words to Patricia, who looks frozen at the camera and turns away.

The movie is deceptively good to look at, which conceals the waywardness of its concept. And more puzzling still, I wish I knew what some critics (and the blurb on the dvd-box blurb) mean when they use the word “existentialist” about this film.