Sick Product of a Sick System

Disturbing yet enthralling

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Two damaged individuals, a precocious twelve-year old girl (Patricia Gozzi) abandoned by her parents and orphaned to a convent and a shell-shocked 30-year-old war veteran suffering from amnesia and vertigo (Hardy Kruger), form a deep emotional bond that is misunderstood and greeted with hostility by others.While their relationship appears to be fraught with the possibility of tragedy, the two find in each other a place to retreat from their unbearable loneliness and loss. While the film is somewhat over-determined, it has a remarkable childlike quality and is performed with startling naturalness and honesty.

I loved this movie so much that my husband and I held our small wedding lunch at the Cabassud restaurant in Ville d'Avray, on one of the two lakes painted so often by Corot and featured prominently in the film. Several years later, when my daughter married, we held a much grander wedding party for her in the same place, attended by many members of the French film colony. It happened to be the evening of the annual Ville d'Avray festival, and quite unexpectedly a procession of people carrying torches appeared out of the night to march around the lake. The wedding was as magical as the film that inspired it. Sadly, I think the film has been mostly forgotten in the United States, but one that can inspire so much romance should be revisited.

This film is first and foremost beautiful. The beauty of the B&W cinematography is appalling. The composition is perfect. The delicate range of grays achieve a silky texture that has an almost tactile feeling. The music by Jarré is beautiful. The child actress Patricia Gozzi is nothing but angelical in her blooming beauty.The story is simple; a former war pilot with war trauma and amnesia and an abandoned little girl meet by chance and desperately cling to each other so as to find company and salvation. The child becomes the more mature of the couple, the adult goes along innocently and follows her counsel, advancing inexorably to his own destruction. The well intended (well, more or less well intended) adult world does not understand the delicate platonic relation, reads it as sinful and deviant, and proceeds to destroy it. The final scene is one of the most painful and desolate in the history of cinema, even though its beauty is unforgettable.The weakness of the movie is that it has not survived well the end of the sixties. Its aesthetics is too connected to the conventions of the time. The human relations are not real enough for our time. There is a degree of rigidity, idealization and oversimplification that does not allow the film to stay alive, as is the case with the masterpieces of Fellini and Bergman. However, this does not detract the movie from its serene beauty, its evocative power, and all the nostalgic pain of a lost love.

Saw this film three times when it was first released in the sixties - the last time walking two miles in pouring rain and skipping study for a college math final the next day. I have not seen a film before or since that has had as powerful an effect on me. If you want to be moved and shaken at the beauty and tragedy of the human condition, see this film. Unfortunately, the video quality is poor, but see it anyway.