I watched this because Greta Gerwig cited it in an interview as an influence when she was making 'Little Women.' But Gerwig, working for Hollywood, could never have made something both as muted and as archly artificial as this movie. It's historical drama done pretty cheap, the sets looking like real rooms that had simply never been redecorated since the film's early 20th century setting; and with a great deal of the info delivered in voiceover, there's pretty much full transparency on the source material being a book (opening credits appear over pages from it). I's all the better for all of that; the usual naive notion that film can actually transport us to some lost era is revealed as the tawdry hubris it is and somehow, for me anyway, the unpolished fakery of it all feels far truer than more faithful copies.
On another note, is Jean Pierre Leaud a genuine sex object or just another of film's ordinary boys somehow getting to profligately sleep with goddesses? Here, at least, he looks much more like the latter and it seems especially ridiculous to see him inspire the mad passions he does in the English sisters. On the other hand, he still has that unique, subtle comedic manner that almost defines the French New Wave, to which his contribution, when you tot it up, was enormous and, to all intents and purposes, essential.
I liked all this best for the film's early, more playful sections. I guess the point is, we start in play and innocence and then things get complicated, but do they also have to become duller, as they do here? On the other hand, the drawn-out vacillation between loving one sister and then the other makes a nice point about how contradictory things can seem absolutely true as we go through life.
On another note, is Jean Pierre Leaud a genuine sex object or just another of film's ordinary boys somehow getting to profligately sleep with goddesses? Here, at least, he looks much more like the latter and it seems especially ridiculous to see him inspire the mad passions he does in the English sisters. On the other hand, he still has that unique, subtle comedic manner that almost defines the French New Wave, to which his contribution, when you tot it up, was enormous and, to all intents and purposes, essential.
I liked all this best for the film's early, more playful sections. I guess the point is, we start in play and innocence and then things get complicated, but do they also have to become duller, as they do here? On the other hand, the drawn-out vacillation between loving one sister and then the other makes a nice point about how contradictory things can seem absolutely true as we go through life.