Excess Alain Delon completism. Prompted by Glenn Kenny's review in 2021 — a Critic's Pick! It took me several goes to make it past the first half hour.
The scenario has Delon holidaying with hot stuff Romy Schneider at a friends' villa in the south of France. She's a writer of some kind, as was he before he failed into advertising. They're still heavily into each other despite it being about two years since they met and both being powerfully inert apart from the scenes of staged friskiness. A friend/erstwhile lover in the tunes business arrives with his previously undiscovered nubile daughter causing the usual complications. Things then grind on as they must.
It's sexy in a camera-objectifying-female-bodies way; it's entirely the male gaze as the women are too busy looking at the men. I found it boring as there is not much of an attempt at developing the characters; for instance it's clear that Delon isn't drinking but we are never given a reason why. Another scene has Schneider getting annoyed at her chopsticks. The attempt to turn it into a detective flick in the last movement is lighter than air.
It's tagged at IMDB as a psychological drama and I guess you could bracket it with minor Hitchcock like Spellbound. At times I wondered if it was taking on more of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? than it could swallow.
Bill Forsyth's first Hollywood feature. Inevitable after Breaking In. Adapted by him from a widely feted book by Marilynne Robinson. Over many nights due to a failure to grip.
Two young ladies (soon enough and mostly Sara Walker and Andrea Burchill) are dumped by their mother Margot Pinvidic (looking a bit too much like Susan Sarandon) on their grandmother in fictional Fingerbone, Idaho. Her passing brings their free-spirited aunt Christine Lahti (...And Justice For All, Running of Empty) back to town and she is entrusted with their care. Her opinions on child rearing are not so much relaxed as entirely absent. Adventures ensure, some growing up occurs but none of the typical coming-of-age stuff.
It's billed as a comedy-drama but I found little of either. There are some of Forsyth's signature moves (repeated motifs, significant gestures). The initial scenes and themes of female freedom/wild abandonment/Pinvidic evoke Thelma and Louise. The described-but-not-shown epic train derailment points toward Magnolia and there's just a dash (maybe) of Welcome to the Dollhouse in Ruth's exclusion from Lucille's social life. Of course Forsyth is too gentle a filmmaker to take any of it to the limit.
Roger Ebert: four stars and much effusion. Sylvia "seemed closer to a mystic, or a saint" than a mad woman. A Critic's Pick by Vincent Canby. Lahti plays "a siren of the open road". IMDB trivia: Diane Keaton was originally cast in the lead. Takes place in 1955. Further details at Wikipedia. Unlike Forsyth's other efforts there's not much of a soundtrack.
