A L'Aventure

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Back in the 1960s there was a sub-genre of French cinema that basically comprised a man and a woman meeting by chance, the man and woman going off to a convenient location and then having sex, and then the man and the woman lying in bed discussing existentialist problems like alienation and the essential futility of life in a bourgeois society. Such films engendered their fair share of parody and for a while they disappeared altogether. While it would be unfair to categorize a l'aventure quite so rigidly, it does bear some passing resemblance to its cousins of yore.

The plot is simple: Sandrine rebels against the claustrophobia of quotidian life by quitting her job and then tumbling into bed with an attractive psychiatrist (yes, in France even psychiatrists are permitted to be sexy) and then informing her live-in fiancee of the fact when she returns home later that evening. She wants to live honestly and openly, and wants to be open to new experiences. What's nice about this film is that the reactions of her family and friends are naturalistic - in short, they think she's silly for not playing the standard games that everyone else plays. As her mother tells her, everyone gets small moments of freedom occasionally, but they have to remain covert. Everyone knows everyone else is cheating, but as long as everyone pretends things are fine, the game can continue without disruption.

Sandrine goes on to meet a friend (and of course former lover) of her psychiatrist Greg, and through that friend she encounters a world of greater passion and eroticism than she's experienced before. It's quite difficult to film scenes of mild S&M (spanking, masturbation) without degenerating into parody or farce, but the movie works reasonably well because it treats the erotic elements as naturally as the non-erotic, with transitions that seem quite naturalistic. Likewise the various sex scenes are adequately done, though the raptures the women experience seemed to this viewer to be somewhat mundane and hardly "the most violent orgasms" they were hypnotically programmed by Greg the psychiatrist to enjoy. A stylistic quirk of the director is to use doors and doorways metaphorically during moments of sexual discovery, and to emphasis this trope by means of a repeated musical motif. Personally I found this a little heavy-handed, a bit like John Wayne wearing the white hat and the Bad Guys wearing black hats in old US Western movies.

As a counter-point to her physical discoveries, Sandrine befriends an old taxi-driver who turns out to be a former physics teacher and would-be spiritualist. It was his initial conversation with her that set her on the path of self-awareness, and it is his conversations with her that expand her mind in parallel with expanding her knowledge of sensuality. These, for me, were the most enjoyable moments of the film not least because the relationship between Sandrine and the Prof conveys initially cautious but increasingly trusting mutual affection and humor. At times the interactions have the quality of ad-lib, where each actor is enjoying the development of character and relationship.

Eventually Greg abandons Sandrine for Mina, the ultra-suggestible woman whom Greg's hypnosis (in typical French fashion he uses a cigarette as his hypnosis object rather than a pen or a fob-watch) carries back into a past life from whence her dream-memories of ultimate ecstacy spring. In an odd little scene, Mina experiences a profound rapture and levitates (sic) for several moments, before gently descending. Immediately afterwards, the room is swept with noise and wind, a supernatural force having been unleashed. After this curious incident (redolent of "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dream'd of in your philosophy") the film ends with Sandrine seeking some kind of explanation from the Prof, but he has none - we are just accidents in the void.

For French speakers, one of the pleasing things about this movie is that for the most part the sub-titles are reasonably accurate and therefore don't distract too much.

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