Amazon.com video review:
This beloved 1962 film from the golden age of international
cinema
can't help but look terribly self-conscious now, full of ambivalent
nods to
the contemporaneous vitality of the French New Wave (an obligatory iris
shot
of star Hardy Kruger, for instance, as seen through something like a
tiny
knothole). There is also a fair amount of dragging and wasted motion in
the
overlong story, but even that is forgivable given this film's
extraordinary,
soulful portrait of a beautiful if impossible relationship. Kruger
plays
Pierre, a former military pilot whose plane crashed after a bombing
raid in
Indochina. Killing a little girl in the process, Pierre suffers a
psychological trauma that is lessened by the company of a 12-year-old
orphan
named Cybele (Patricia Gozzi), herself an abandoned, luckless child in
need of
companionship. Meeting every Sunday, the two become immersed in a
deeply
affectionate
world of their own, where nothing unsavory actually occurs yet a full
range
of
emotional colors seems possible--much like two innocents reborn in each
other's eyes. Cowriter and director Serge Bourguignon adopts a
fairy-tale
tone for both the central bond between Pierre and Cybele as well as the
oddly
harsh, uncaring social environment that inevitably condemns their
union.
Bourguignon is lucky to have a couple of important allies: Maurice
Jarre
for
the musical score and legendary cinematographer Henri Decae behind the
lens.
While these artists can't save Bourguignon from his own trite excesses
as a
visualist, they enhance his considerable feeling for the redemptive
poetry
of
an unlikely love. --Tom Keogh
