I give this a 6/10 because it is not boring and because I am an easy grader. I was so confounded by the script I could not be bored.
First off, why is Rossano Brazzi playing a Frenchman? But that is the least of this film's problems. At first I thought I was watching a movie about a war ravaged romance (Kerr as an English woman and Brazzi as a French officer during WWII). Then I thought I was watching a movie about a British woman forced to deal with the stresses of surviving a war alone while raising her young fatherless son. After that I thought I was watching a movie about a reunited culturally blended family attempting to make a go of it after nine years of estrangement. I couldn't be more wrong.
This turned out to be a movie about hypocritical counseling from one French philanderer about another. As the "wise" uncle-counselor, Maurice Chevalier rationalizes to the despondent and confused Miss Kerr about her husband, his nephew; "you married a Frenchman. You cannot make him into an Englishman or an American . . . If you want to be happy you have to think like a Frenchwoman". With that Deborah Kerr responds with the only logical response in the movie; "we'll it seems as if I'm expected to do all the changing. It's a bit one sided don't you think? And why can't marriage change both husband and wife? . . ." And the scene that sums it all up; as his son watches on, Rossano Brazzi unapologetically ogles Parisian beauties for his offspring to observe.
What is Brazzi doing? At first it seems like he may be maintaining multiple households with multiple wives. But then in one scene with one of them he is just having them take dictation. Is he a bigamist? Is he part of some secret business deal he cannot let his wife in on? Nope, he is just a philanderer on a grand scale. Also it seems like Brazzi and Kerr's characters only have anything in common in the bedroom. They bicker the rest of the time. And the son? Is Kerr sure the dad is not an American? Because the son turns out to be a capitalist extraordinaire. He tries to keep them apart when they separate so that they do not reconcile since he can get much more stuff when they are in a bidding war for his affections.
Recommended for the weirdness of it all. I blame "Around the World in 80 Days". After that film won the Best Picture Oscar in 1956 in spite of just being one long travelogue, lots of films emerged whose producers and directors seemed to think that they could just shoot on location in Europe and put up any kind of drivel as a plot and succeed. This seems to be one of those films.
