Hollywood filmmaking reached its aesthetic apex in the 50s. Though many directors used the studios’ vast resources merely to tell stories, auteurs were breaking new ground with their use of composition, camera movement, and editing, presenting their narratives clearly enough to meet the demands of the mass audience yet artfully enough to be almost abstract works of moving light.
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Following fairly closely the Francoise Sagan novel on which it’s based, the film’s principal action occurs in summer in and around a villa on the French Riviera rented by wealthy playboy Raymond (David Niven) for himself, his teenage daughter Cecile (Jean Seberg), and his current mistress, Elsa (Mylene Demongeot). The father and daughter are quite close, but the film avoids suggesting incestuous desires, as does the book: Raymond and Cecile are bonded by their shared enjoyment of laughter and silliness, partying, and gentle relaxing (one morning they “smell the day” together). Cecile has become accustomed to Raymond’s steady stream of much younger mistresses, but then a longtime family friend of about his age, accomplished fashion designer Anne Larsen (Deborah Kerr), joins them at the villa. Elsa, feeling abandoned, departs with an admirer named Pablo, and Raymond and Anne become a couple and announce their plans to marry. Unfortunately for Cecile, the serious Anne wants her to study for a philosophy exam (instead she does yoga–“Hindu philosophy”–in her room) and bans her from further contact with her boyfriend, Philippe (Geoffrey Horne). Sensing that her years of happiness with her father may be ending, Cecile hatches an ultimately disastrous plan: she convinces Philippe and Elsa to pose as lovers, hoping to goad Raymond into trying to win Elsa back from the much younger Philippe.
Intercutting color with black-and-white footage is an obvious stylistic device, and on the whole Preminger’s style here is relatively transparent, especially compared with such contemporaneous masterworks as Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Welles’s Touch of Evil. Preminger’s camera follows the actions of his characters; only rarely does the camerawork seem self-conscious. But the film does establish a dreamy continuity from one seaside scene to another, a spell at once broken and enhanced by these scenes’ juxtaposition with the gray, bleak present.
Preminger further undermines his romantic idyll, turning it into a near fantasy, with the framing sequences in black and white. These are printed on color stock, so that the grays and blacks are not the absolute tones produced by silver but the more tentative ones produced by color dyes. This also links the black-and-white and color sections, making the gray Paris scenes seem like variations on or consequences of the sunlight-saturated ones, drained of color by the cold reality Cecile and Raymond have tried so hard to avoid.
