Cinema: Pillow to Proust

Playtime. In the good old days in Hollywood, when a girl fell in love with the boy next door, the kids got married and lived happily ever after. In this new French film, based on a story by Françoise Sagan, the girl (Jean Seberg) is a spoiled NATO tomato, the boy (Christian Marquand) is a kept man, and they would obviously rather have a ball than a wedding.

Sick and sixteen, the heroine is the daughter of a U.S. officer who puts her up at a fancy French academy while he assiduously golfs to keep himself in SHAPE. Flirty and thirty, the hero is a sculptor who sponges off a rich woman (Françoise Prévost)—and takes her money too. One day the girl jumps the wall that divides her school from his house, and introduces herself. She needs a man, she world-wearily explains to him. “from time to time.” He needs a change of sheets to help him sleep better—he has nightmares about an accident in which he killed a man with his Ferrari. When his mistress finds out what’s on his mind, she urges him to grab the girl and “get it over with.” He does. Whereupon the girl goes briskly back to school, the man goes briskly back to his mistress. Fin.

Jean Seberg, as she was in Breathless, is depressingly effective as a small-town broad abroad, the sort of disinhibited Amie most Frenchmen earnestly implore to go home. Françoise Moreuil, Seberg’s ex-husband, shows a pretty flair for direction in his first film. He keeps the story bouncing from pillow to Proust, and he bathes scene after scene in a morning light of such glittering purity that the spectator is simultaneously delighted by the physical beauty and disgusted by the morbid decadence he sees. It’s like being served a dead mouse glacé.