I'd heard about it for years, read essays on it too, but didn't get around to see it until a few months ago when I borrowed the dvd - though I'd seen some other nouvelle vague films. I felt it was less open, less catchy than I thought it would be, less tense perhaps. It's a very good film, I liked watching it and no trouble for me seeing why it was groundbreaking in its age, but it doesn't feel as direct and engaging to me as, let's say, Munich (Spielberg), The Mother and the Whore (Eustache), Blow-Up (Antonioni) or Now, Voyager (Rapper, with Bette Davis) - all of those have layers of meaning and implied questions burrowing under the overt story and they all challenge our ideas of men and women, in that sense they are like Jules and Jim.
JJ seems a bit more distant in all its exploration of feelings, and I think it appeared more direct in the sixties because aggressive and acting-out female characters, self-contained "lovely bitches" like Catherine were less common then - on screen and in real life, and then Moreau would come across a lot more striking in that sense than she does to me now. She poses a kind of challenge that was new, only just happening. Remember, this film is from the *early* sixties, it's the same time when the Beatles early singles and publicity shots appeared kind of dangerous, upsetting. We can't even get now why She Loves You or A Hard Days Night seemed sloppy and dangerously anarchist. It's a long way to Malcolm X and Janis Joplin.
Liz Taylor would often do that kind of part, but JJ appeared four years before Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf and in that one, the character is framed by her alcolholism and a constraining marriage while Catherine is not overtly presented as weird or sick, rather she fuses ways of action and temper that used to be seen as exclusively masculine with her womanliness. That must have been very striking in the sixties, but now it takes a bit of effort to see it.
After the revolution everything will be different. Your password is 'Giliap'!
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