Cinema: Laughter Through Screams

The Five-Day Lover (Kingsley International), for about an hour and a half, is the year’s funniest movie, a pouf of glittering froth from France. And then, as though the camera were slowly drawing back, the context of the comedy widens and the laughter dies in the spectator’s belly as he perceives that the froth is bubbling from the lips of a corpse, from the sores of a rotting civilization. The effect is disturbing and profound. In his third feature film Director Philippe de Broca (The Love Game, The Joker) emerges as a narrow but brilliant comic poet, the melancholy master of a strange rose-black hilarity perhaps best described as laughter through screams.

The picture starts out as a naughty, nutty boudoir farce. The lover it celebrates (Jean-Pierre Cassel) is a gay young gigolo whose rich mistress (Micheline Presle) keeps him comfortable but also keeps him busy. Even so, the lover has enough libido left for a chic chick (Jean Seberg), and for several reels the tandem romance rackets merrily along. Neither mistress knows he has the other; he on the other hand is blithely unaware that both attend the same hen parties, and one day . . .

Yet even as his champagne cocktail rises to full fizz, De Broca drops the Mickey in. Gradually he lets it be seen that none of the characters is really living his own life, that all instead are playing safe by playing roles, the usual overcivilized charades. Mistress No. 1, a successful couturiére, lives a man’s life because she is afraid to be a woman. But she is also afraid to be alone, especially at night, so she rents a sheep she can count on till she falls asleep. The hero himself, more honest and more naive than the others, is a mother’s boy who likes to think of himself as a Don Juan but has become, in effect, a male prostitute.

Mistress No. 2 plays two compensatory roles. In the one she is a grubby little housewife who patiently swallows a sedative husband (François Perier), in the other a glamorous woman of the world who takes lovers like Dexedrine tablets.

Her husband, a grubby little librarian whose lifework is a thesis on an obscure medieval plumber, is the most pitiful and yet by all odds the most human of De Broca’s characters. He knows very well that his wife is unfaithful yet he hides what he knows, partly because he loves his wife, partly because he despises himself, mostly because he is afraid to rock the boat. When she runs off to assignations he stays home to mind the babies; when she comes home he tells her how fresh her skin looks, how bright her eyes are. And sometimes, wretched to the core, he even makes an ass of himself in public to satisfy her need for a fool to deceive.

All four parts are played in high comic style. Actress Presle portrays without pity the labored cuteness, the varicose ardors of the nymph at 40. Actress Seberg achieves exactly the right matte shade of skin, the look of slightly tainted meat that suggests and ever so slightly caricatures the girl who sleeps around. Actor Perier interprets to absurd perfection the sort of paterfamiliarity that breeds contempt. And Actor Cassel flutters across the screen with the abandon of a butterfly that, without hope of heaven, can at best expect to spend eternity in a cocktail tray.

Nevertheless, it is De Broca who at every instant dominates the film. Over his brilliant butterfly, over all his pathetic ephemerids he flings a subtle net of woven meanings. Always the ironist, he is much too sly to moralize, but his characters are clearly and consistently, in the religious sense of the word, desperate. They are disciples of je m’en fichisme, the popular French cult of so what. They find no meaning in their lives, no souls in their bodies. They make a religion of the senses and a hollow of their hearts. Gaily, gaily they dance the dance of life, which is also the dance of death. Since life has no meaning, time has no importance; they kill time until time kills them.