A film for grown ups. Young American artist Jean Seberg's experiences of love in France. She dates a terribly annoying man Phillippe Fourquet, and after a really awful near seduction in a cheap and freezing hotel room, he admits he's only sixteen. Then she's having affair with Jack Hedley, but he goes off with a Greek. Stanley Baker's itinerant journalist becomes her beau, but he can leave her for a North African tour for three months and expect her to wait for him. But after a heart to heart with her visiting father, who proclaims her paintings have become actually worse than they were, she settles down with a San Francisco surgeon. (You sort of know that marriage isn't going to work out.) This all from two Irwin Shaw short stories, 'In the French Style' and 'A Year to Learn the Language' (he wrote dozens of them).
Has traces of New Wavery to it. e.g. dizzying rides on back of French boy's scooter, 'wild' party (did parties like that ever really happen?)
It has a melancholy air to it. Nicely photographed and edited by Michel Kelber and Renée Lichtig (all the crew are French) and good music from Joseph Kosma. Jane Eakin did the paintings.
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| Fourquet was actually 22! |
Seberg was based in France from 1959 when she met her first husband while filming Bonjour Tristesse. She returned to Hollywood in the late sixties but we all know what happened then, and she died in Paris in 1979.
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