Naked Autumn. “People go stale after ten years,” says a bored French wife, languishing in the country with her equally bored husband. Such is the ambivalence of married love that the couple’s passion has long since turned to hate and to Gallic variations on the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? theme —their favorite happens to be a form of boudoir bingo that has already alienated the wife’s best friend and driven the husband’s auto-racing teammate to suicide. This time out, they notice a lissome young schoolteacher. The wife befriends the girl, brings her home, immediately begins to preen her as a morsel to renew hubby’s flagging appetite for l’amour.
All this sounds foolish enough, and probably would be, were it not for Simone Signoret’s 100-proof performance as the kind of woman who gets into a man’s blood. She drinks too much, gambles too much, talks too much. But she is a heady dish all the same. When the schoolteacher (winningly played by Alexandra Stewart) comes to dinner, the wife purrs: “Who shares your bed? I hope you’re not still a virgin at 20.” A few more remarks like that and her husband has had enough of her unpredictable bitchery. “What are you trying to do?” he asks. “Ruin your evening,” she answers swiftly, each syllable etched in acid.
The film suffers because its battle of the sexes is an uneven contest. Reginald Kernan—an American physician turned model and actor—looks fine in hunting clothes, but seems generally opaque as the husband. He is clearly outclassed by Signoret, whose vast aplomb enables her to crack open a fifth of Johnnie Walker and dab Scotch on her wrists and ear lobes for all the world as if it were Jolie Madame.
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