Secret World (1969) User Reviews

A wisp of a story centering on a young boy's infatuation...

[Doylenf · 5/10 · 1 August 2007]

If beautiful photography and lovely views of rural France were enough to sustain a slight story, SECRET WORLD (U.S. title) would be worth recommending. JACQUELINE BISSET is at her most photogenic as the mistress of a British gentleman (PIERRE ZIMMER) who is also attractive to the man's son (MARC POREL) and a young boy who has lost his parents in a tragic car accident (JEAN-FRANCOIS MAURIN).

The story has the young, highly impressionable young boy mooning after the beautiful young woman and jealous of anyone else who pays her attention, particularly Olivier (MARC POREL) who is obviously in love with his father's mistress but finds himself rejected by her on more than one occasion.

There's an enigmatic quality to the story and the way certain scenes are played, even an erotic moment--a love scene in the woman's boudoir where we don't see whether it's father or son acting as lover.

Bisset is lovely but poker-faced throughout, as though she feels that giving that face to the camera is all that's required. Most intriguing performance comes from MARC POREL as the reckless, adventuresome young son who admits to his father that he loves the woman.

The boy is sensitive enough in a role that requires that quality in spades, but with him too it's largely a matter of looking photogenic for all his huge camera close-ups.

The pretty photography is the film's chief asset, but it's all rather forgettable as a story of uneasy relationships under the same roof.

An Ambiguous Meditation on Desire

[Johann_Cat · 7/10 · 2 January 2009]

This film has several compelling qualities: among them, its setting: it is shot at a lush estate, with environs more wild than cultivated, and there is a mining operation chomping at the edges nearby. Children play and excavate their burgeoning romantic lives at this unmanned mining site. The lushness, beauty, and vulnerability of the estate stand in opposition to the metallic and depressed qualities of the people who live there. This irony is unusually well-handled. The photography itself is lovely, too, with beautiful, impressionistic color schemes and many strong compositions involving foreground objects and long views, like unto a de Chirico interior with an open window. This film is a tricky meditation on loss and desire (a boy has lost his parents, and falls into an obsession with Bisset, the daughter of a friend of his adopted father), and operates more like a dream than a conventional romance. I actually like the weird effect of some of the players (especially the children, who act fairly convincingly, especially for 1970) speaking English with a French accent. What's tricky about the film--and I have only seen it once and thus feel my jury is "out" on the whole--is that no character in the film is really sympathetic; it is a given that the adult men are creepy and competitive, and the surrogate mother is a ghastly bitch to the boy, but her situation is partly explicable by the emotional ineptitude of the men. The characterization of the boy may be realistic, but he is so affectless and kleptomaniacal (he is forever creeping about and stealing small things; his first act in the film is to suck the contents out of a chicken egg stolen from a nest) that a kind of vacuum exists at the film's center. The boy and his adopted family are plainly meant to be a kind of upper-class travesty trembling on the verge of transformation, and this depiction operates near satire. Well and good, but Jacqueline Bisset seems mishandled by the director and make-up people, who try to make her some sort of blonde fairy princess. I can't tell if this is meant as irony or not (even if one didn't know her, she looks "put on"). Blonde and pink suit her about as convincingly as $2 joke glasses and a funny nose would. I find her presentation distracting; but maybe anything so artificial in this film should be mulled over before one rejects it. The music in the film is pretty good stuff on its own, but here I found it jarring. Its horror-show swells anticipate mid-70s films about possessed children, and this kid has troubles, but he's no demon-seed. The music is often bombastically portentous and discordant, while the script and action are dreamy, perplexingly artificial, and ambiguous. If the music is meant to "indicate" the boy's internalization of the "horror" in the family, this is an ultra-melodramatic choice in what is otherwise a fairly impressionistic, low-key film. (For comparison's sake, I imagine that key influences on this film are Antonioni's "Red Desert," with its sublime, dehumanized industrial landscapes as figures of desire and Losey's "Accident," a deliciously grim film about male competition, a princess, and the sub-urban death drive).

Numbing drama

[JohnSeal · 4/10 · 20 December 2002]

Directed by Beatle photographer Robert Freeman, Secret World looks great. Freeman knows how to frame a shot, consistently posing his actors in complimentary settings. Unfortunately, the story is so wispy that it almost disappears. Jacqueline Bisset plays a young Englishwoman hired by a French patrician to care for his son, a mournful sort who potters around in a holy old brown pullover for the entire film as he falls in love with the new 'older woman' in his life. She's trying to maintain a relationship with a dashing young Frenchman with a sexy sportscar. There's not much more too it than that--so enjoy the visuals and Bisset, who probably never looked better!

Growing pains drama with a sexual undercurrent

[moonspinner55 · 4/10 · 29 September 2016]

Jean-François Maurin plays a young French boy, orphaned and living with relatives on their estate, who develops a passionate pre-teen crush on Jacqueline Bisset, a houseguest from London--and his uncle's not-so-secret mistress. Directed by celebrated photographer and designer Robert Freeman, with assistance from Paul Feyder, this melodrama looks exquisite, with artistic scene composition and misty-dreamy, autumnal locales. Cinematographer Peter Biziou obviously worked closely with Freeman in getting just the right look for the film, and his close-ups of Maurin's inquisitive, slightly repulsive little freckled face are commanding (we end up anticipating more from the youngster's expressions than what the screenplay eventually gives us). The plot isn't much more than an adult roundelay as seen through the eyes of a child, and most of the sequences involving the boy are uncomfortably rendered (perhaps because his actions and emotions--particularly his adolescent jealousy--seem almost personal and immediate). Overall, however, the picture doesn't quite work, and this may be due to Bisset's casting. Trapped underneath a thick blonde wig, Bisset is unable to communicate to us the character she's playing; the actress has always been a cool customer, and not really adept at being flirtatious (there's no spark of mischief in her calm, dead stare or even tones). Although we understand the boy's attraction to her beauty (even with that awful wig), Bisset doesn't intrinsically draw people to her. She could be acting all on her own, her scenes spliced into the narrative, and the effect would be the same. ** from ****

Cute & Sensitive

[bigdinosaur · 8/10 · 21 December 2002]

Brief synopsis: Francois is a brooding boy mourning the loss of his mother who becomes fatally attached to his uncle's English mistress.

I enjoyed this movie simply because it's a very human tale and depicts well the heightened sensitivity of a child. And I enjoy movies which deviate from the standard plots as this one did.

This rare look at a child's impressions & reactions stresses the impact small lies and thoughtless actions can have on a child---especially one who has suffered a loss. And also how much joy simple attentions can bring.

If you're wanting any action or simple romance, you'll have to look elsewhere. Fans of American movies may not care for this selection.

I really enjoyed this...

[juanmuscle · 10/10 · 2 March 2021]

What was so great about it , was that it remained innocent and cute throughout the whole thing, I was sitting there expecting it to get raunchy but it remained wholly inviolate and beautiful like a rose that never ever loses its bloom and it was quite touching as it nuanced the maternal instinct in a tangential way punctuated the thing in ways that left you wanting more, more of the character to hang out just a lil' longer if not to find out more , to reach out and say hey, its going to be OK, even though you are fake and its fiction and it all happened a million years ago and you are all perhaps deed, this is still a wonderful tale that can last forever!