La morte saison des amours1961

sweet the women rule_the writer is an idiot but he wakes up_another intellectual french love story

Not sure I get it, but this seems like is was way ahead of its time regarding women and power.

Fairy tale young lovers live amidst a "kingdom", where they meet the royal couple. Soon enough there's temptation, adultery and seduction. Very sophisticated allusion to passion and love making, but very little happiness or (believable) love. Then this story seems to be driven by a determined intent on making some provocative statement about women's power and sexual liberation! Wow - I was surprised, and at the same time, felt repelled. You see, Genevieve's character was pretty lame and wimpy. I wasn't convinced she deserved the pleasure of one man let alone two ... but there you have it. And back at the kingdom, the sexy one: turns ice queen. Left to rule ... in solitude. Not fair. Ah ... the legacy of French cinema. Delicious, fun and entertaining.

Pierre Kast's La morte saison des amours (1961) is a rather complex, even confusing film, that only started to make some sense to me AFTER I viewed. The film barely has a coherent storyline, and can perhaps be described as an "evolving drama", as if the filmmaker was creating the scenes "on the fly" while in the process of shooting the film. Yet, the tight motivational pattern between the main characters, even though it evolves over the course of the film seems to preclude that possibility. This film, as it is, was definitely well planned, that is, a screenplay was written for it, before the shooting of the film began. As such, the lack of a solid and well defined storyline in this film seems to place it in the "slice of life" category of cinematic taxonomy, or perhaps the film can be said to be a cinematic expression of the old French saying "C'est la vie". In the context of American slang, this film perhaps can be best understood as an example of "Shit just happens !!!" In any case, this 1961 film is way ahead of it time, echoing feminist themes from the future, and openly displaying a sexual attitude within marriage that is rather liberal for 1961, even for a French film. The ending of the film particularly broadcasts this sexual liberality, where three main characters, two men and a woman, are seen driving down the road together. This is a rather provocative final scene, because during the course of the film, we learn that two of the people in the car are married, the wife of this married couple has an affair and falls in love with the other man in the car , this "other" man in the car has left his wife flat after his affair with the married woman in the car made him realize that his marriage was loveless and just a sham, the two men in the car have become, and still are, good friends, and the woman in the car openly professes to be in love with both men in the car, both her husband and her lover. So all this definitely begs the question: "Where is car with two men and a woman actually going?" This is not so much a question requiring a geographical answer, but answer regarding the possible future relationship between these three people. Although the film does not exactly express this possibility, it is highly suggestive that the two men and the women driving down the road at the end of the film have a destination where the two men continue to be friends but somehow share the woman in the car as a "common wife". This is indeed a radical suggestion for a 1961 film, even a French one.