Cinema: Country Matters

Nutty, Naughty-Château is a house divided between Director Roger Vadim and Novelist Françoise Sagan. On the framework of Sagan’s first play, Château in Sweden, which enjoyed a long run in Paris, Vadim and an associate script carpenter have slapped together a film comedy that deserves to be condemned, and probably will be. It is synthetic, flimsy and obvious. Yet through the cracks in the walls one can still glimpse the work of a wry, precocious playwright who knows how to make decadence amusing.

“I am tired of hiding my Jeep,” bellows the lord of the manor, Curt Jurgens. To please his eccentric sister, he dresses in period costume and banishes all evidence of the 20th century from the family’s isolated ancestral estate in the Swedish lake country. Jurgens’ second wife is Monica Vitti, a sultry charmer who enjoys a casually incestuous relationship with her brother Sébastien (Jean-Claude Brialy) and soon begins cooing with Cousin Eric (Jean-Louis Trintignant).

When Eric learns that Jurgens’ officially deceased first wife Ophélie (Francoise Hardy) is still-alive and sequestered in the castle, the family decides to dispose of him forthwith. During one eventful night, Eric survives attempts to poison him, gas him, drug him and freeze him to death.

Clearly, Château cannot stand on its plot alone. But Vadim goes farther to bring it to sure ruin by translating high comedy into languid boudoir farce. Time and again he sacrifices wit, worldliness and style to make room for a blonde (Vitti) in a bed sheet—the Vadim trademark—then repeats the obligatory routine with a brunette (Hardy). What he conveys, at last, is a boyish conviction that these bored, civilized votaries of pleasure might be just the sort for a fun weekend, but no longer. Sagan’s sidelong glance at the enigma of women, in Vadim’s view, is no enigma at all. It is merely a nutty, naughty peep show.