AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Derry Herrera Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Marguerite LeDragon Jeanne, played by Jeanne Moreau, is a married mother and housewife in the provinces. Her husband Henri is handsome, successful, and cultured, but also an arrogant stuffed shirt who seems indifferent to her unhappiness. She has little to do and is lonely at home. To divert herself, she spends time with her shallow, trend-following friend Maggie in Paris. She begins an affair with suave high society polo player, Raoul, but is still unfulfilled.Henri invites Raoul and Maggie over and in the course of the night, makes the two of them seem ridiculous and sows discord between them and Jeanne. Raoul in particular is revealed as a lightweight whose dedication to starting a new life with Jeanne is destroyed by Henri's bourgeois solidity and ability to make their sham marriage seem real. Meanwhile, Jeanne has gotten a ride home after her car broke down by a young handsome archaeologist, Bernard. He is abrasive and immature, but also sincere and romantic, and the two fall in love. She is able to find happiness again in loving Bernard after years of boredom, but the future of the lovers is uncertain.Jeanne Moreau is brilliant at depicting a woman who is bored and unfulfilled, looking beautiful but not so secretly empty both in her fancy bourgeois house and in the childish diversions of Parisian fashionable circle. Alain Cuny as Henri is imposing and self-satisfied as her husband who doesn't take Jeanne seriously, feeling that he has the money and the power and is ultimately in control. Jose Luis de Villalonga as Raoul is convincing as a man who appears at first sophisticated and dapper but is actually weak and indecisive. Judith Magre as Maggy is somewhat overly comical as the shallow society friend. Jean-Marc Bory as the young lover is very handsome and with his physical presence and warm gaze and smile convey the ideas of sincerity, beauty, and natural masculinity that can spark Jeanne's happiness, although I felt that there was something lacking in his performance and chemistry with Jeanne to be totally convincing.There is something still impressive and challenging in the movie's depiction of Jeanne abandoning everything solid in her bourgeois life and even leaving the home where her child is growing up in a search for authenticity, love, and happiness. In particular, the film feels still shocking in its refusal to condemn Jeanne with the expected moralizing ending.The relationship between the two lovers, however, seems somewhat unmotivated and abrupt. Even though we know that Jeanne is very unhappy, and the stranger "represents" the sincerity missing from her life, nevertheless the attraction doesn't feel convincing, and it's even less clear why exactly Bernard chooses her. Bernard seems too good to be true, and one keeps expecting him to reveal himself as flaky and regretting his whim.Then, too, the attack on bourgeois society, in the person of Henri, could be sharper. If one is young and rebellious and inclined to dislike people like Henri, the critique might seem convincing. Otherwise one might find him relatively sympathetic - true, he is not as warm and idealistic as Bernard, but arguably his practicality, stability, and respectability have as much of a role to play in society.This is a good film that stands the test of time as interesting and worthy. Even if the sex scene in it is by no measure shocking nowadays, it still is challenging in its depiction of a passion that shocks convention. It's not at the level of later films by Malle like The Fire Within or Lacombe Lucien that feel more complex and realistic, but the focus on the feminine perspective gives it a special interest.

Hitchcoc I know it's not fair to criticize a film because of its basic milieu. Jeanne Moreau is a rich woman who has probably married for money. Her husband is a clueless bore who runs a newspaper. They are extremely rich, with cooks and housemaids, and lots of time to get in trouble. He doesn't seem to have much affection for her (although she is a knockout) and encourages her to go to Paris and hang around with her equally useless friend. There she meets a polo player and he offers her some adventure, though when push comes to shove, he's not much different than her husband. The hard thing for me is that I couldn't care less what happens to her. She has pretty much all she wants and, I believe, a dolt of husband who must know she is having contact with men on the make. Things change when, after her car breaks down, a professor rescues her and then accompanies her back to her home. All participants in the drama are there: the husband, the polo player, and the vapid friend. Because this new guy is aggressive and not willing to cotton to her spoiled brat being, she finds him irresistible. LIke a dog on the prowl, he quickly seduces her and within one night, they are talking about running off together. Moreau is beautiful. That's about it. There is a very sexy scene for its time. The movie, for me, is utterly lacking in any semblance of real interaction. How can these people co-exist? Visually, it is quite well done and Louis Malle is a great director, but... For a moment, I hearkened back to the final scene in "The Graduate" as Katherine Ross and Dustin Hoffmann sit in the back of the bus, wondering what the future will bring.

bandw This is the story of Jeanne Tournier, a bored upper class woman who tries to escape her situation through romantic love. While it would be unfair to expect the depth of character development in this movie to match that in the similarly plotted novels "Madame Bovary" or "Lady Chatterley's Lover," this presentation seems particularly thin.Some half century on this movie has lost some of its punch. Apparently it was considered to be sexually avant-garde at the time of its release, but it would probably get a PG-13 rating now. There are things that make this worth seeing. As Jeanne Tournier, Jeanne Moreau does turn up the heat and her fans will want to see this. There is some nice black and white camera work. There are a lot of night scenes (filmed day for night, as Malle comments on the DVD extras) that are atmospheric and augment the intimate scenes.While the erotic scenes might not jar, a shocking thing even for contemporary audiences is the fact that Jeanne would take off and leave her child behind. Also Jeanne engages in two adulterous affairs without remorse--that would have had 1950s audiences talking, and some contemporary audiences as well. Thinking about the future of the renegade couple, I think it will not take Jeanne and her lover long to realize that she is taking her boredom with her.

danielhsf Louis Malle's Les Amants is the most romantic film ever made. Screw subjectivity and critical judgment. I've just come off fresh from seeing it, and, in the spirit of the film, I'll let my excitement wash over me instead of letting it die down to see it coolly. Seeing it gave me one of those precious moments, moments where you gasp and go oh-my-god, disbelieving your eyes that cinema could go to places like this, and make you feel things you never felt were possible in fiction.Buried within the Optimum Releasing of the Louis Malle box set, but it emerges the most deafeningly romantic, even when compared to the already celestial ending of the more famous Elevator to the Gallows. Its blissed out view on happiness makes it impossible to attach any critical adjectives to it; it requires us to suspend all thinking faculties and just go with that one powerful emotion.It's amazing how it turns what could've looked like a cover of a chick romance novel into something this beautiful. Henri Decae, who almost single-handedly created the first images of the New Wave, literally sets the screen aglow in ecstasy, painting the two lovers in a heavenly light in that pivotal centerpiece, which is one of the greatest moments of cinema, bar none. Even Jean Vigo's L'Atalante holds nothing on this. (There will be spoilers from hereon, and I would urge you to stop reading this paragraph if you've not seen the film. The joy of discovery in this film is so much more than any other film I've experienced, that I'm wholly convinced that one should experience this as fresh as a virgin.) Stripped of their daily pretenses and graces, the two lovers traverse a God-made Eden, becoming simply Man and Woman and reuniting again, several millenia after the First Man and First Woman were expulsed from paradise. When Jeanne Moreau takes Jean-Marc Bory's hand and asks him 'Is this the land you created for me to lose myself in?', the gaze is sealed and the viewer can do nothing but share in their passion. The two lovers become such eminent symbols of love, sex, and happiness that it's hard to imagine anything more sensual and erotic than this, especially when compared to the fully colored and fully exposed sex symbols of today. They belong to an era removed from any other, not the era that the film was made in, but a black-and-white, pristine era that exists only in cinema, one in which true love still exists without the moorings of reality.And the decided lack of moorings in this film is what makes it so bewitching. Whether it's the fleeting white horse or the eyes of the beautiful beautiful Jeanne Moreau, the film doesn't look back, but indulges fully in the moment, that moment of sensuousness. It is so fitting that the film should be called Les Amants, because anything else would be pretension - the lovers become the lovers of any era, any millennium, by their love alone they have been elevated to the great lovers that have long passed. They transcend being, nature, rules and become one - spirits entwined - with a world that is beyond the tangible, such that any rational reasoning will not be understanding. It's a magical world, a fantasy world, a world that is as unreal as we want it to be real. And this world, the film proposes, can only be reached through a temporary moment of love, un-selfish, immaterial, illogical, and unquestioning love. And when you're able to give yourself in, together with the film, it suddenly becomes so clear and not that unreal anymore.At the risk of sounding like a nut, I just wanted to recommend this film to everyone who thought that this century has made us cynical. Cinema, which began and evolved with this century, has rarely stepped out of its time so gloriously that it becomes a monument, a structure of those classical (and probably impossible) days. It is the single most ravishingly beautiful moment in the history of cinema.