Cinema: Feminine Mysteries

Loss of Innocence (Columbia). “Hockey’s all very well in its way, but it isn’t really living, is it?” Joss speaking. She is 16, English, carefully brought up, and if she suspects that hockey isn’t living she doesn’t really know what is. This British adaptation of a 1958 novel (The Greengage Summer) by Rumer Godden describes, with delicacy, irony, passion, poignance, wisdom, melodrama, and all the charm and fragrance of a young girl’s rising summer, how Joss begins to live, begins to love, begins to die among the greengage orchards of Champagne.

She goes there on holiday with her mother, who falls seriously ill on the way and is rushed off to the nearest hospital. Joss (Susannah York) and the three smaller children put up at a pretty pension in the country—actually a small chaāteau done over. Drōle de ménage. The mistress of the establishment, a pretty spinster (Danielle Darrieux) of a certain age, is in love with the star boarder (Kenneth More), a dashing Englishman who instantly appoints himself acting uncle to the children, fighting their battles with the help and taking them for drives.

The younger children adore him and he likes them too—all except Joss. For Joss he has the sort of feeling it doesn’t do to think too much about, under the circumstances. And what does she feel for him? She hardly knows. But she knows that he finds her exciting, and that she finds that exciting. Utterly without experience, perfectly without conscience, she decides to experiment, to practice her apprentice sorceries on this available male.

With that decision, all unwitting, she sets her foot on the road of experience that spirals down the magic mountain of childhood, down into a world without hockey, a world where she is suddenly evil and cruel as well as good and kind, where a furious mistress throws champagne in her face and a busboy (David Saire) tries to rape her and she herself in a girlish pique betrays the Englishman to the police, and only the next day discovers that she loves him. “I’ll never love anyone else!” she sobs as the road seems suddenly to end in the middle of nowhere. But the Englishman smiles gently as he says: “Goodbye. Joss. This summer you’ve grown up.”

The feminine mysteries are essentially inexpressible, and writers who try to express them slip generally into soap opera or a sort of exquisite silliness. Author Godden does neither, and in this film, which clings to her theme and hues to her mood as the clear peel colors and cleaves to a plum, the camera seems at moments to enlarge and lay bare on the screen the inmost, intimate mystery of maturation. Too often the view is obscured by the arabesques of an intricate and suspensefully entertaining plot, but often enough the onlooker is left quietly alone with Actress York, who at 22 can still quite easily pass for bittersweet 16. who with marvelous urgency seems to writhe and swell and blush and suffer and ripen and resolve into physical and spiritual womanhood before the spectator’s eyes. It is a heart-shaking thing to see.