I’m not sure this one suffered from great expectations (I knew all along it wasn’t my ‘kind’ of story, though in its writer/director I was sure I’d find much to admire), but I have to admit from the start that this one didn’t live up to the hype surrounding its Criterion release, for me. Wilder’s overwritten patter and comic style works well in styles as diverse as broad comedy and darkly comic noir, but it struck me as very out of place in a dead-serious socio-political diatribe such as this. Kirk Douglas plays his role in yuk-yuk style well befitting other Wilder works, but again it rubbed me the wrong way here. Anyway, this seemed to detract from, rather than enhance, the power of what has been called Wilder’s most “uncompromising” work.

This is what a sex comedy looks like when there’s little sex and less comedy. Still, likeable enough, and I can’t say I had a bad time watching any movie with Carmen in an over-the-top nymphomaniac role.

This film simply knocked me out. And as has frequently happened this year, it is the most random choice of the week that did it: I had no reason to see this film, except a sudden whim to see a few Sabine Azéma films before Resnais’ Coeurs (a small way of curbing my regret at missing it in the cinematheque, I’m sure). So I had no expectations. And it might be the most profoundly moving film I’ve watched all month…

This beautiful film, set in the French countryside perhaps on the verge of WWI, revolves around an elderly painter, whose children visit less frequently than he would like, whose wife has passed on, whose career has essentially run its course. In the course of one, rare visit from all his children and grandchildren, all are confronted with images of death and pangs of longing, all of which they keep to themselves. Partly built on social codes and partly on a familial habit of repression, all their interrelations are defined by silent negotiations: Irene will not tell her father she has a lover and he will not ask, though he knows it, because it would only make both unhappy; Ladmiral believes one wrong word would send his adoring housekeeper packing, and so he carefully keeps the piece.

Just about every shot in the film echoes the great French artists of the time, but those images are turned to decidedly filmic use in giddy, marvelous, heart-rending ways. It is a slow, emotional, impressionistic film in which little happens but much is suggested — and it’s an immensely fulfilling exercise if the viewer is interested enough in the subjects breached to engage with the film completely. This is precisely the sort of film I want that sort of relationship with. In Irene, particularly, I have found another of my cinematic alter-egos: for all appearances, she is a free woman, self-made and afraid of nothing, but in truth she is morbidly afraid of death and romantically attached to a life she will never lead. “Irene,” her deceased mother questions in a memory, “when will you stop asking so much of life?” Later, in a breathtaking scene in an outdoor dance hall, she confesses to her father, “I want to live what I dreamed.” She is a child who will perhaps never grow up. Her father is left with a mountain of regrets, having never found an original or innovative style as a painter; he too is haunted by visions of his wife, and by the end of the film perhaps comes to a sort of peace with being close to greatness and having loved greatly. Few films are so suffused with life and death, in perfect balance, full of rich, honest characters, and unbelievably evocative imagery. And as one example is really not enough to represent this film: