For someone like myself - English born and bred - it would be sufficient to seek out and watch this film merely because it was directed by Jean Delannoy, a man despised by Truffaut and his raggle- taggle band of new waveleteers, a group of petulant schoolboys despised with equal vehemence by myself for their attempts (luckily without enduring success) to do to French Cinema, which I love passionately, what Stanley Kowalski did to Blanche DuBois. In truth, of course, I needed no such excuse to watch a film which, as winner of Best Film and Best Actress at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946 (it WOULD have been 1939 but something happened to cause its postponement) had a lot to live up to; Michele Morgan was a given of course; she had been lighting up the screen from Gribouille through Quai des Brumes, Remorques, and a couple of lesser-known (especially outside France) titles like L'Entraineuse and Les Musiciens du ciel, and Pierre Blanchar was one of the men who signed Marie Bell's dance- card in Duvivier's sublime Un Carnet de bal. The story of a middle- aged man falling in lust one orgasmic sigh short of incestuously with a girl half his age with whom he lives for one reason or another both in close proximity and denial is hardly new - Arthur Miller, for instance got a fine play, A View From The Bridge, out of it - and inevitably, as here, it is a situation that ends in tears and all the viewer can do is enjoy the journey. In this case it is a journey that Truffaut and his fellow iconoclasts couldn't even aspire to let alone complete.
Review of Pastoral Symphony
