Cinema: Minus Ambiguity

The Third Lover flashes a beacon of straightforward storytelling over the dark seas of French cinematic symbolism: with its honest camera work and well-motivated plot, the film is unlikely to provoke much cocktail party comment because it is so understandable.

The picture is about envy. A French newspaper writer (Jacques Charrier) comes to a village outside Munich and, after basking for a while in self-pity because nobody will notice him, manages to meet a jolly German (Walther Reyer) who is a famous and successful author. To Charrier’s amazement, Reyer and his stunning wife (Stephane Audran) make him feel so at home in their luxurious villa that he soon has a latch-key familiarity with the couple. This sudden rescue from loneliness should make Charrier happy; instead, watching Stephane perch adoringly on the arm of her husband’s chair, Charrier decides that he must spoil things for them. Snooping on Stephane when she makes daytime trips to Munich, he discovers that she has a lover. Charrier takes photographs of them embracing on street corners, behind shop windows. He shows the pictures to Reyer —a cruel series of enlargements in which a kiss is blown up into a closeup of the lovers’ lips, grainy, harsh, terrible. The husband is quiet while he studies the enlargements, then murmurs: “Happiness is so fragile.” The picture’s climax is bloody, its denouement is filled with despair.

Director Claude Chabrol’s choice of the dimple-faced Charrier to play his twisted protagonist brings a touch of spoiled boyishness to a role that might have been merely sinister in more virile hands. Much of the plot is forthrightly told in the first person by Charrier’s own voice—an earnest of Chabrol’s continuing drift away from the Marienbadian labyrinths and the Breathless ambiguities of some of his fellow New Wave moviemakers. Plain moviegoers are going to like it.